Temple Grandin:

You know what working at the slaughterhouses does to you? It makes you look at your own mortality.

When I was younger I was looking for this magic meaning of life. It's very simple now. Making the lives of others better, doing something of lasting value, that's the meaning of life, it's that simple.

An exchange:

Troy: Don't kid yourself Jimmy. If a cow ever got the chance, he'd eat you and everyone you care about!

Jimmy: Wow, Mr. McClure. I was a grade A moron to ever question eating meat.

Troy: Yes you were Jimmy, yes you were.

Lydia Davis:

I look across the road here at how still the cows stand, a lot of the time.

Phil Agre:

Increasingly freed from geographic constraints and equipped with powerful search tools, we will be able to pick out exactly the people we want to associate with, and we will be able to associate with them whenever we want.

The problem with feudalism, of course, is that most of the relationships aren't good ones, so that everyone is trapped in the relational world they were born with.

Virginie Tisseau:

I ride the tram because every day it takes me to a place less familiar.

Lydia Davis:

When you slide by it all, so fast, you think you won't ever have to get bogged down in it again -- the traffic, the neighborhoods, the stores, waiting in lines. We're really speeding now. The ride is smooth. Pretty quiet. Just a little squeaking from some metal part in the car that's jiggling. We're all jiggling a little.

Ellis:

All the time you spend tryin to get back what's been took from you there's more goin out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it.

Rivka Galchen:

Even though I very much like people in general, I find most people, in specific, kind of difficult. I prefer the taciturn company of my things. I love my things. I have a great capacity for love, I think.

An exchange:

Dante: You hate people.
Randal: But I love gatherings. Isn't it ironic?

An exchange with Michael Haneke:

Q: Why are your films always so disturbing?

A: Audiences are having mainstream cinema and television touch on only the surface of things, and they get irritated when confronted by a more exacting gaze into the depths of our existence.

David Foster Wallace:

Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you've never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it's like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.

Cormac McCarthy:

Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.