It was a huge zoo, spread over numberless acres, big enough to require a train to explore it, though it seemed to get smaler as I grew older, train included. Now it's so small it fits in my head.

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.

The business of imagined pleasure is associated with pain.

something about the phrase - something abouthow i have to be unlike the womeni call sisters in order to be wantedmakes me want to spit your tongue out

Pray for others because others are selflessly praying for you as well.

The decision as to whether to risk one’s actual life or to surrender the ideal self-conception is a decision about who one is.(from The structure of desire and recognition)

Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.

Solitude is not an absence of energy or action, as some believe, but is rather a boon of wild provisions transmitted to us from the soul.

His blue eyes were seas where sorrow sailed.

My career's been a steady, interesting, weird, frustrating, fun journey at all different times.

A woman is most merciless when shame goads on her hate

A lot of people believe that you don't need to know the history and that creates newness. I disagree: we should always be informed and then destroy it.