We are all born like Catholics, aren't we—in limbo, without religion, until some figure introduces us to God?

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.

Keep good company, read good books, love good things and cultivate soul and body as faithfully as you can

Eisenhower on LBJ: "He hadn't got the depth of mind nor the breath vision to carry great responsibility.

If it had attempted to strengthen then I still receive, but if that had been repeated to make me give up. So I gave up.

I was just thinking when I was a young girl I never knew what every young girl was supposed to know. And now I am going to be an old lady I don't know what every old lady is supposed to know.

Being a foreigner is not a disease.

For a long time that's all I could do, howl and scream and cry like the wild animal of the night that I'd become.

When I got the job on 'Lost,' I was a broke university student living in the crappiest part of town, with a duct-taped back window on a broken-down car. I existed on peanut butter and tea.

I think I may drop dead on the stage someday. I hate to think of it. But it's getting tough on me, the travel. The show, I somehow manage to rise up to it, you know. But I have no desire to retire.

I just keep working on things I like, and hope for the best. I hope people enjoy them.

And after drawing comes composition. A well-composed painting is half done