Was it the forgetfulness of old age or personal incapacity that made the man able to say please but not thank you?

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 feeling of being both trapped and free at the same time is the most mind twisting feeling of all.

Only the legs that run are those that really have muscles!

At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities - to clarify just who it is we really are?-Richard

Compassion for animals is intimately associated with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.

I love writing about people on the road.

We're just people Jo he said quietly. Yeah I suppose. People with fangs who drink blood live a long time and apparently do crafts. She shook her head.

The best that can happen is that someone can catch a glimpse of the glory you're hinting at.

If modesty and candor are necessary to an author in his judgment of his own works, no less are they in his reader.

Life is a loom, weaving illusion.