Atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith, and every word they speak speaks of faith. Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason will carry them -- and then they leap.

You must take life the way it comes at you and make the best of it.

My life is like a memento mori painting from European art: there is always a grinning skull at my side to remind me of the folly of human ambition.

Slice a pear and you will find that its flesh is incandescent white. It glows with inner light. Those who carry a knife and a pear are never afraid of the dark.

Zoo is an artificial territory, an approximation. Civilization is our natural territory.

To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.

Life is a peephole, a single tiny entry onto a vastness--how can I not dwell on this brief, cramped view of things? This peephole is all I've got!

We commonly say in the trade that the most dangerous animal in a zoo is Man.

I know zoos are no longer in people's good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both.

If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn't love hard to believe?

No one dies of nausea, but it can seriously sap the will to live.

For my mum, to whom I'd turn in a heartbeat.

My joy was ghostly, like something not quite realized.

Cannot you conceive that another man may wish well to the world and struggle for its good on some other plan than precisely that which you have laid down?

Happiness is free like the air we all breathe

If you ask me what I came to do in this world I an artist I will answer you: T am here to live out loud.'

Accountability only works if you want it to.

The highest purpose in this universe is the creation of an effect.

It's you my love, you who are the stranger.

Perhaps the earth can teach us As when everything seems dead And later proves to be alive

To be clear, the gap between the have gots and the have nots is widening. In this most multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic America ever, that concerns me.