People From Washington D C

""Why do beautiful songs make you sad?" "Because they aren't true." "Never?" "Nothing is beautiful and true." (p. 43)"

"It's always possible to wake someone from sleep, but no amount of noise will wake someone who is pretending to be asleep."

"The responsibility lies with the mentality of the meat industry that treats both animals and "human capital" like machines ... human beings cannot be human (much less humane) under the conditions of a factory farm or slaughterhouse."

"Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else?"

"People care about animals. I believe that. They just don't want to know or to pay. A fourth of all chickens have stress fractures. It's wrong. They're packed body to body, and can't escape their waste, and never see the sun. Their nails grow around the bars of their cages. It's wrong. They feel their slaughters. It's wrong, and people know it's wrong. They don't have to be convinced. They just have to act differently. I'm not better than anyone, and I'm not trying to convince people to live by my standards of what's right. I'm trying to convince them to live by their own."

"By the standards of the international human rights community, the typical working conditions in America's slaughterhouses constitute human rights violations."

"Ray Black was in prison, so we weren't able to talk to him. I did some research on the internet and found out that he was in prison because he murdered two children after he raped them. There were also pictures of the dead children, and even though I knew it would only hurt me to look at them, I did. I printed them out and put them in *Stuff That Happened To Me*, right after the picture of Jean-Pierre Haigneré, the french astronaut who had to be carried from his spacecraft after returning form the MIR spacestation, because gravity isn't only what makes us fall, it's what makes our muscles strong."

"He had a wall of masks from every country he‘d been to, like Armenia and Chile and Ethiopia. It‘s not a horrible world, he told me, but it‘s filled with a lot of horrible people."

"There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him, so I buried them, and let them hurt me. (p. 181)"

"I put my hand on him. Touching him has always been important to me, it was something I lived for. I never could explain why. Little, nothing touches, my fingers against his shoulder, the outsides of our thighs touching as we squeeled together on the bus. I couldnt explain it, but I needed it. Sometimes I imagined stiching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love?"

"I said, I want to tell you something She said, you can tell me tomorrow I had never told her how much I loved her. She was my sister. We slept in the same bed. There was never a right time to say it. It was always unnecessary. I thought about waking her. But it was unnecessary. There would be other nights. And how can you say I love you to someone you love? I rolled onto my side and fell asleep next to her. Here is the point of everything I have been trying to tell you, Oskar. It's always necessary. I love you. Grandma."

"The mistakes I've made are dead to me. But I can't take back the things I never did. (p. 309)"

"It's easy to be emotional. You can always make a scene... Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing." "So what's something?" "Being reliable is something. Being good."

"I wanted to build walls around him, I wanted to separate inside from outside, I wanted to give him an infinitely long blank book and the rest of time. (p. 280)"

"But more than that, no unloving words were ever spoken, and everything was held up as another small piece of proof that it can be this way, it doesn't have to be that way; if there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it heavy walls, and we will furnish it with soft red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweler's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does."

"I used to tuck her … but now she tucked my feelings into the woven arteries of my veins."

"I used to think that humor was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is. But now I think the opposite. Humor is a way of shrinking from that wonderful and terrible world."

"I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn't the world, it wasn't the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, my cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don't know, but it's so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it. (p. 17)"

"Every parent who loses a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls. The hurt lessens. Every love is carved from loss. Mine was. Yours is. Your great-great-great-children's will be. But we learn to live with that love."

"Words never mean what we want them to mean."

"My friends are appeased to stay in Odessa for their entire lives. They are appeased to age like their parents, and become parents like their parents. They do not desire anything more than everything they have known."

"She spent the afternoon staring at their front door. "Waiting for someone?" Yankel asked. "What color is this?" He stood very close to the door, letting the end of his nose touch the peephole. He licked the wood and joked, "It certainly tastes like red." "Yes, it is red, isn't it?" "Seems so." She buried her head in her hands. "But couldn’t it be just a bit more red?" (pp. 79-80)"

"It feels like a moment I've lived a thousand times before, as if everything is familiar, right up to the moment of my death, that it will happen again an infinite number of times, that we will meet, marry, have our children, succeed in the ways we have, fail in the ways we have, all exactly the same, always unable to change a thing. I am again at the bottom of an unstoppable wheel, and when I feel my eyes close for death, as they have and will a thousand times, I awake."

"So many visitors came to rub and kiss different parts of him for the fulfillment of their various wishes that his entire body had to be rebronzed every month. He was a changing god, destroyed and recreated by his believers, destroyed and recreated by their belief... Those who prayed came to believe less and less in the god of their creation and more and more in their belief."

"SADNESSES OF THE COVENANT: Sadness of God's love; Sadness of God's back [sic]; Favorite-child sadness; Sadness of b[ein]g sad in front of one's God; Sadness of the opposite of belief [sic]; What if? Sadness; Sadness of God alone in heaven; Sadness of a God who would need people to pray to Him..."

"Accepting the compromise of the way we have been, the way we are, and the way we will likely be... may we live together in unwavering love and good health, amen."

""You do not have to present not-truths to me, Sasha. I am not a child."(But I do. That is what you always fail to understand. I present not-truths in order to protect you. That is also why I try so inflexibly to be a funny person. Everything is to protect you. I exist in case you need to be protected.)"

"Brod’s life was a slow realization that the world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, she would never be happy and honest at the same time. She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release. Table, ivory elephant charm, rainbow, onion, hairdo,mollusk, Shabbos, violence, cuticle, melodrama, ditch, honey, doily … None of it moved her. She addressed her world honestly, searching for something deserving of the volumes of love she knew she had within her, but to each she would have to say, I don’t love you."

"That's the thing about L.A.- you can freeze to death under a rosebush, Richard says."

"There is no VIP room in reality, and there is no reality in this city. You can't Google the answer."

"Are you really gay? Yes. Do you think you were born gay or became gay? Are you asking because you want to know if it's your fault? I suppose. To one degree or another, I'm sure it's your fault. Feel better now?"

"Conflict is necessary for growth. But too often conflict becomes a haven for the soul. Until one day, the soul can no longer free itself. In real growth the soul learns to fly rather than having the ego inflated with praise from accomplishments as if it were a balloon. Only because it buys time, do we develop a strong and protective ego. This is the early stage in the soul’s evolution, until such time when the soul hatches out of its shell, which is the ego, into a new world in which there is incomparable beauty."

"One element that seems to run throughout Martin's forty years of work is the physical and psychological mechanics of the body/mind. Whether spirited in animals or manifested through abstraction, they are about ourselves: our neurosis, the dreams we hope for, how we eat... Ultimately though, they reveal our resistance to escape the gravitational pull of stillness - the inevitable conclusion to life."

"As have the Chinese and English Languages, Eugene has stripped his grammer to the naked bone, sinewed the simple frame, and created a rich vocabulary of meaning, sight and emotion. Yet, always there is discipline."

"Lorsque l'art d'écrire obsède mon esprit et ronge insidieusement mes forces, je laisse errer mon regard sur un dessein d"Eugene Martin, je me repaîs de ses couleurs sereines et puise des certitudes dans ses lumières si denses."

"MUSEUM They came, they looked, they walked their eyes wide open they didn’t see because their minds were closed Their eyes wide open they didn’t know they couldn’t see because their minds were closed; so they looked, and left."

"Beware of the possible reason some people are honestly down and out - it is because they tried to copy the many who are superficially doing well."

"Truth rides best In that which looks ridiculous."

"Rather than programming children as if they were computers, parents should be something like art instructors. Because life is like a clump-of-clay, you can’t make it into an expression of beauty, unless you take it into your hands. While sprinkling their lives with painful and playful diversions, people wait their lives miserably into old age, for the skills to live-life, to–come as did life- itself."

"Things differ because of the time in which they exist. In time, things opposite will reverse themselves. Also, judging does the opposite of clearing it confuses. Now, if any of this you judged to be non-sense, then perhaps it’s not so obvious that judging is the worst escort perception can have."

"Vanity begins and ends with deception, so the reason people put interesting and attractive clothes on their bodies is perhaps the same for having uninteresting and unattractive expressions on their faces."

"Truth is so large OR people’s minds are so small that they’re only able to nibble on the edges – and when growth brings them to the area where they can feed on truth itself, as they move in and eat of the seed, there they become truth."

"Because of guilt there is painful diversion; because of greed there is playful diversion; because of grass there is pleasurable diversion."

"Having a sincere desire to want growth does not mean at that point you are committing yourself to growth."

"'It’s a great tragedy that the ability to act is used to manipulate people, but it is a greater tragedy that people welcome it while sometimes making a phony protest."

"There are lesser people not for what they are, but for why they are."

"It’s past time that people get involved in thinking – now that the computers can take over the field of memory."

"People fight not because they disagree,but because they don’t know they agree."

"Being able to communicate with someone doesn’t necessarily mean that you understand them."

"Most writers are successful in getting their readers’ attention, but fail at getting them to think. If you’re asked to explain anything philosophical to anyone, the chances are great their understanding will be superficial; it’s best they don’t understand than to think they do, so encourage them to grow into understanding and don’t hand them too much explanation."