“I think a human animal is far more wild and unpredictable and dangerous and destructive than any other animal.”

“When you're used to having electricity and then all of a sudden it's taken away, you're basically just one step from being a wild animal.”

“I'm not really sure what makes a book a 'classic' to begin with, but I think it has to be at least fifty years old and some person or animal has to die at the end.”

“It's my mother's job to answer the question of how I got here; it's my own job to say where I'm going, and all I can really say is that now that I'm in my late thirties, unmarried, and irregularly employed, I have come to realize that merely remaining alive is more of an achievement than I expected.”

“Anil may have been human, but he thought like Rrilk," Phiirr said. "And I never found out what a Twinkie was.”

“<...> I’venever believed there is any animal more dangerous than a human being. I never will. It’s the intelligence. It’s the mind that makes it so.”

“When Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, he exposed the world to a momentous discovery . For the first time in history, human beings were seen not as creatures of divine origin, but instead, as a product of nature, an animal like every other on the planet. Imagine yourself back in that amazing year. The day before Darwin’s book was published, you wake up thinking yourself the image of God; the next morning you realize you have the face of a monkey. Not everybody immediately embraced this rude demotion from god to goat.”