The language of prose is very different than the language of cinema, so the movie has to successfully translate what was in the book.

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.

And, in the endThe love you takeis equal to the love you make.

Everyone is useful for specific task.

Now I've a sheep and a cow, every body bids me good morrow.

Husbands and wives should understand that their first calling-from which they will never be released-is to one another and THEN to their children.

Even in your smallest gestures, you express your sense of honor, if you have one.

Woman! Come out! I have—" She looked down at the bloodless grass, embarrassed. "I have come to rescue you," she finally said, as if admitting that she were covered in boils.

One rose is enough for the dawn

History is the invention of historians.

Fifty percent of the United States of America is underneath the ocean. And we have better maps of Mars than those areas.

Change your focus from making money to serving more people. Serving people makes the money come in.