“The way we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than in the previous 10,000.”

“One essential characteristic of modern life is that we all depend on systems—on assemblages of people or technologies or both—and among our most profound difficulties is making them work.”

“Human beings have a strong dramatic instinct toward binary thinking, a basic urge to divide things into two distinct groups, with nothing but an empty gap in between. We love to dichotomize. Good versus bad. Heroes versus villains. My country versus the rest. Dividing the world into two distinct sides is simple and intuitive, and also dramatic because it implies conflict, and we do it without thinking, all the time.”

“My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations.”

“Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.”

“Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

“Don't let the bastards grind you down.”

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

“Now, as a grown man, I feel privileged to have come from two worlds. My view of the world is not merely that of a black man but that of a black man with something of a Jewish soul.”

“I have hated words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.”

“Janie saw her life like a giant tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches.”

“Life was a wheel, its only job was to turn, and it always came back to where it started.”

“Wendy? Darling? Light, of my life. I'm not gonna hurt ya. I'm just going to bash your brains in.”

“It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.”

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

“I now walk into the wild.”

“I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.”

“Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do.”

“While it is always possible to wake a person who's sleeping, no amount of noise will wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.”

“There is one kind of prison where the man is behind bars, and everything that he desires is outside; and there is another kind where the things are behind the bars, and the man is outside.”