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��Had she ever really understood her husband’s true nature, bound up as it was with that seemingly impenetrable silence? She’d thought, at one time, that it might be revealed in his work…Despite her best efforts, though, his works proved incomprehensible to her. Nothing was revealed.��

��The very idea that there should be this other side to her, one where she selfishly did as she pleased, was astonishing. Who would have thought she could be so unreasonable.��

��It’s not difficult to see why a book that exposes this pervasive structural violence might have been received differently by the (mostly older male) literary establishment than by the many Korean women who didn’t consider it “extreme and bizarre�� at all. Perhaps the overwhelming focus on The Vegetarian’s aesthetics is a way of avoiding talking about its politics?��

��I think moral fiction is less about signaling to the reader that you voted for the right people or that you are able to listen to people who would have you destroyed. Moral fiction does not signal. That is propaganda. That is social work. Not that these are unimportant things, but they are not art. And they are not moral.��

��She discovered that all the different animals shared one common language; they just spoke the language in different ways. You might say each species spoke with its own unique accent.��

��[I]t was a quiet spring. There were fewer insects buzzing, fewer birds singing, fewer rodents rustling. Many creatures had frozen to death over the winter. And as the last of the snow melted away, their corpses were slowly revealed. The wilderness really can be ugly sometimes. But from that ugliness came beauty. You see, those poor dead creatures returned to the earth, their bodies nourished the soil, and they helped create the most dazzling spring bloom the island had ever known.��

��Maybe Roz really was defective, and some glitch in her programming had caused her to accidentally become a wild robot. Or maybe Roz was designed to think and learn and change; she had simply done those things better than anyone could have imagined. However it happened, Roz felt lucky to have lived such an amazing life. And every moment had been recorded in her computer brain. Even her earliest memories were perfectly clear. She could still see the sun shining through the gash in her crate. She could still hear the waves crashing against the shore. She could still smell the salt water and the pine trees. Would she ever see and hear and smell those things again? Would she ever again climb a mountain, or build a lodge, or play with a goose? Not just a goose. A son. Brightbill had been Roz’s son from the moment she picked up his egg. She had saved him from certain death, and then he had saved her. He was the reason Roz had lived so well.��

��If I could do it all over again, I'd spend more time helping others. All I've ever done is dig tunnels. Some of them were real beauties too, but they're all hidden underground, where they're no good to anyone but me.��

��It felt as if the ink had crawled up from hir guts and ripped free onto the page, splattered there in a horror show of anger and need and pain. This was what it was like, in words—insufficient, flat, a belly-shaking cry distilled into a page of symbols. This was what it was like to yank at the edges of the gash and look at the insides.��

��It felt as if the ink had crawled up from hir guts and ripped free onto the page, splattered there in a horror show of anger and need and pain. This was what it was like, in words—insufficient, flat, a belly-shaking cry distilled into a page of symbols. This was what it was like to yank at the edges of the gash and look at the insides.��

��Tactics in the authoritarian playbook include appealing to emotion over reason, exploiting divisions, undermining critics, dismantling public institutions, stoking violence, and creating an image of the Leader as both an everyman and a superman. Disinformation is the catalyst that allows these tactics to work.��

��To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.��

��To become a crowd is to keep out death. To break off from a crowd is to risk death as an individual, to face dying alone. Crowds came for this reason above all others. They were there to be a crowd.��

��Stochastic terrorism occurs domestically in the United States when prominent Americans use their platforms to aggressively demonize others��

��To stop the truth killers from succeeding, we must get more serious about fighting the amplification of misinformation and disinformation, and for that we need to create more reason for both partisan and social media outlets to curb the role that they play in propagating polluted content.��

��Up here, nice feels such an alien word. It’s brutal, inhuman, overwhelming, lonely, extraordinary and magnificent. There isn’t one single thing that is nice.��

��Maybe humankind is in the late smash-it-all-up teenage stage of self-harm and nihilism, because we didn’t ask to be alive, we didn’t ask to inherit an earth to look after, and we didn’t ask to be so completely and unjustly darkly alone.��