“My life is flashing lights and pointing fingers and uninvited visitors. Inches away, humans flatten their little hands against the wall of glass that separates us.The glass says you are this and we are that and that is how it will always be.”

“My visitors are often surprised when they see the TV Mack put in my domain. They seem to find it odd, the sight of a gorilla staring at tiny humans in a box. Sometimes I wonder, though: Isn't the way they stare at me, sitting in my tiny box, just as strange?”

“All day, I watch humans scurry from store to store. They pass their green paper, dry as old leaves and smelling of a thousand hands, back and forth and back again.They hunt frantically, stalking, pushing, grumbling. Then they leave, clutching bags filled with things - bright things, soft things, big things - but no matter how full the bags, they always come back for more. Humans are clever indeed. They spin pink clouds you can eat. They build domains with flat waterfalls.But they are lousy hunters.”

“I've always believed that to some extent you get to decide for yourself what your life will be like. You can either look at the world and say "Oh, isn't it all so tragic, so grim, so awful." Or you can look at the world and decide that it's mostly funny.If you step back far enough from the details, everything gets funny. You say war is tragic. I say, isn't it crazy the way people will fight over nothing? People fight wars to control crappy little patches of empty desert, for crying out loud. It's like fighting over an empty soda can. It's not so much tragic as it is ridiculous. Asinine! Stupid!You say, isn't it terrible about global warming? And I say, no, it's funny. We're going to bring on global warming because we ran too many leaky air conditioners? We used too much spray deodorant, so now we'll be doomed to sweat forever? That's not sad. That's irony.”

“... You're sunny. You keep showing up here." Diver"I'm not sunny, I'm alcohol. No, no, I mean, I'm Summer," Summer says."Don't say that," the little boy said, suddenly frightened. "You're disturbing my wa.”

“What's love? Something that lasts a week or a month and that's all you can except? Or is it just that some loves have a short shelf life? You know, like yogurt: after a week or two they go bad.And how do you recognize the other kind of love, the kind that isn't like yogurt? The kind that's more like... I don't know, like peanut butter, that lasts forever and always tastes good?”

“A good zoo," Stella said, "is a large domain. A wild cage. A safe place to be. It has room to roam and humans who don't hurt." She pauses, considering her words. "A good zoo is how humans make amends.”