Much hostile and aggressive behaviour among animals is the expression of social insecurity.

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.

He shrugs. "Doesn't help to waste my time thinking about would've-beens."Laila whispers, "He says to the girl with a mind full of them.

We all have a reason for living I am blessed mine has two eyes a heartbeat and calls me mum.

Well into adulthood, writing has never gotten easier. It still only ever begins badly, and there are no guarantees that this is not the day when the jig is finally up.

We are walking through a field of burning bushes, of the everyday heroes God puts in our lives.

never say never see what is possible if you never give up

Sometimes we owe a friend to the lucky circumstance that we give him no cause for envy.

Play is always voluntary. What might otherwise be play is work if it's forced.

If a day goes by without my doing something related to photography, it's as though I've neglected something essential to my existence, as though I had forgotten to wake up.

Public behavior is merely private character writ large.

Scold your children, and they will know what is wrong; but correct them with love, and they will know what is right.