Quotes 4

Perhaps you did well to die before this revolution which claims you as its prophet, engulfing you sometimes in an ocean of saccharine compliments, and sometimes in the sea of blood spilled on the guillotines. I doubt my ability to give you an adequate representation of the cataclysms it has been our lot to endure… p.3

I am resolved to write the story of my life in plain terms and to describe my experiences as I lived them, without alteration or deletion. I know the terrible motto you chose for yourself, Jean-Jacques: vitam impendere vero, ” to sacrifice my life to the truth.” To that end, you lived in a  solitude I could never have endured. I loved too much the company of women, and the society of men: two worlds wherein one must lie to others if he does not wish to lie to himself. But I believe I have not been unworthy of you. I have sacrificed my life to the truth. p.4

The Only Son; Stéphane Audeguy,translated from the French by John Cullen

Quotes 3

Sometimes in summer, as the long day drew toward evening and we knew we should be starting home to the farm, we’d both lie facedown on the hillside and push our faces right into the harsh dry grass and hard clodded dirt, breathing in the infinitely complex smell, hay-sweet and soil-bitter, of the warm summer earth, our earth. Then we were both Saturn’s Children… pg. 16

Even in the true wild where there were no paths we were afraid of wolf and boar, not man. Because this order had held all my life as a girl, I thought it was the way the world had always been and would be. I had not learned how peace galls men, how they gather impatient rage against it as it continues, how even while they pray the powers for peace, they work against it and make certain it will be broken and give way to battle, slaughter, rape, and waste. Of all the greater powers the one I fear the most is the one I cannot worship, the one who walks the boundary, the one who sets the ram on the ewe, and the bull on the heifer, and the sword in the farmer’s hand: Mavors, Marmor, Mars.  p.30

Lavinia; by Ursula Le Guin

Quotes 2

‘Nobody should,’  said Joel. “That’s why in the Bible the priests drew lots to determine who would conduct the ritual slaughter, and they rotated the job every month. Slaughter is dehumanizing work if you have to do it every day.”

Temple Grandin, the animal-handling expert who’s helped design many slaughterhouses, has written that it is not uncommon for full-time slaughterhouse workers to become sadistic. “Processing but a few days a month means we can actually think about what we are doing”, Joel said, “and be as careful and humane as possible.”

-The Omnivore’s Dilemma, from Chapter 12, Slaughter In a Glass Abattoir, p. 235