“All his life he tried to be a good person. Many times, however, he failed. For after all, he was only human. He wasn t a dog.”
“The Folk doubtlessly learned this lesson long ago. They do not need to deceive humans. Humans will deceive themselves.”
“For truly we are all angels temporarily hiding as humans.”
“We are star stuff harvesting sunlight.”
“When humans were young, they were pushed around in strollers. When they were old, they were pushed around in wheelchairs. In between, they were just pushed around.”
“Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose, keep in touch (or don t), care about birthdays, waste and lose time, brush their teeth, feel nostalgia, scrub stains, have religions and political parties and laws, wear keepsakes, apologize years after an offense, whisper, fear themselves, interpret dreams, hide their genitalia, shave, bury time capsules, and can choose not to eat something for reasons of conscience. The justifications for eating animals and for not eating them are often identical: we are not them.”
“Your cravings as a human animal do not become a prayer just because it is God whom you ask to attend to them.”
“We felt so small with the city lights stretching forever below us, and we yelled at the top of our lungs because we were just these small humans but we felt more longing than could ever fit inside us.”
“I have always swung back and forth between alienation and relatedness. As a child, I would run away from the beatings, from the obscene words, and always knew that if I could run far enough, then any leaf, any insect, any bird, any breeze could bring me to my true home. I knew I did not belong among people. Whatever they hated about me was a human thing; the nonhuman world has always loved me. I can t remember when it was otherwise. But I have been emotionally crippled by this. There is nothing romantic about being young and angry, or even about turning that anger into art. I go through the motions of living in society, but never feel a part of it. When my family threw me away, every human on earth did likewise.”
“My emotions still held a stubborn hope that humans could be loyal, that they could hold out against the promise of an easy life. But I knew better.”
“...the chief cause for the impending collapse of the world - the cause sufficient in and by itself - is the enormous growth of the human population: the human flood. The worst enemy of life is too much life: the excess of human life.”
“A falcon hovers at the edge of the sky. Two gulls drift slowly up the river. Vulnerable while they ride the wind, they coast and glide with ease. Dew is heavy on the grass below, the spider s web is ready. Heaven s ways include the human: among a thousand sorrows, I stand alone.”
“Most killers have pretty average lifestyles. Steady jobs too. Sometimes they re even living the family life-white picket fence and a four-door sedan. That s what makes them so scary. They act human and they slot into society and since a young age they ve known how to hide the crazy; they put it up on a shelf and only bring it out on special occasions.”
“Everything made by human hands looks terrible under magnification--crude, rough, and asymmetrical. But in nature every bit of life is lovely. And the more magnification we use, the more details are brought out, perfectly formed, like endless sets of boxes within boxes.”
“Humans live in a pit of cheating, exploiting, hurting, incarcerating. Every time, the species wastes some part of what it could be. This waste is poisonous.”
“The world out there is nothing more than a load of places with people in ’em. And the people out there are neither more interesting, nor better, nor lower, than us here in Angle Tar. It’s humans, Rue. We’re the same wherever you go, no matter what we surround ourselves with.”
“You eventually just move on with your life. I m sure others would go back to their normal lives too, eating and sleeping and all, although it may take them longer than me. Humans are designed to move on and keep on living after all.”