“What we call happiness is sometimes the accordance between our life and circumstances,our biography and history ,our personal aspirations and historical currents .If i look at things that way,I can say : I was born too early to be happy.But birth is one of the many things we do not get to choose.It's part of our destiny.If I were offered life again,I would refuse it. But ,If i had to be born again. I would choose my life”
“All men and women are born, live suffer and die; what distinguishes us one from another is our dreams, whether they be dreams about worldly or unworldly things, and what we do to make them come about... We do not choose to be born. We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoch, the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing. We do not, most of us, choose to die; nor do we choose the time and conditions of our death. But within this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we live.”
“She reached down and traced my eyebrows. 'You do have really beautiful eyes.''We get to keep them,' I said.Grace started at my voice. 'What?''It's the one thing we keep. Our eyes stay the same.' I unclenched my fists. 'I was born with these eyes. I was born for this life.”
“They say that in the second before our death, each of us understands the real reason for our existence, and out of that moment, Heaven or Hell is born. Hell is when we look back during that fraction of a second and know that we wasted an opportunity to dignify the miracle of life. Paradise is being able to say at that moment: "I made some mistakes, but I wasn`t a coward. I lived my life and did what I had to do.”
“We all live in a tragicomic situation, a life that is in part absurd simply because it is not of our own making. We are born into a disordered world, into a family we did not choose, into circumstances we would have had somewhat improved, and we are even called by a name we did not select. (40)”
“I watched the gorilla's eyes again, wise and knowing eyes, and wondered about this business of trying to teach apes language. Our language. Why? There are many members of our own species who live in and with the forest and know it and understand it. We don't listen to them. What is there to suggest we would listen to anything an ape could tell us? Or that it would be able to tell us of its life in a language that hasn't been born of that life? I thought, maybe it is not that they have yet to gain a language, it is that we have lost one.”