The blackness would stir and eventually go away, and God would remain, a shining point of light in my heart. I would go on loving.

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 trouble with eating Italian is that 5 or 6 days later, you're hungry again.

This is the story of America. Everybody's doing what they think they're supposed to do.

Birds sing after a storm why shouldn't people feel as free to delight in whatever remains to them?

That he is mad 'tis true 'tis true 'tis pity And pity 'tis 'tis true.

The future is merely a shadow which blocks out the joys of the present and emphasizes the miseries of the past.

All we have to see is that I don't belong to you, and you don't belong to me.

A married woman has the same natural right to acquire and hold property, and to make all contracts that she is mentally competent to make reasonably, as has a married man, or any other man.

I was not a classic mother. But my kids were never palmed off to boarding school. So, I didn't bake cookies. You can buy cookies, but you can't buy love.

The true Filipino is a decolonized Filipino.

Humility is not cowardice. Meekness is not weakness. Humility and meekness are indeed spiritual powers.