“Listening is such a simple act. It requires us to be present, and that takes practice, but we don't have to do anything else. We don't have to advise, or coach, or sound wise. We just have to be willing to sit there and listen.”

“We all belong here equally...Just by being born onto the earth we are accepted and the earth supports us. We don't have to be especially good. We don't have to accomplish anything. We don't even have to be healthy.”

“I think the future is like anything else that's important. It has to be earned. If we don't earn it, we don't have a future at all. And if we don't earn it, we don't deserve it, we have to live in the present, more or less forever. Or worse, we have to live in the past. I think that's probably what love is - a way of earning the future.”

“I think that if we just listen to ourselves we know what it is we have to do . . . . And I have come o think that however much it hurts, however hard it is, we have to listen. We have to live our lives.”

“Don't listen to a man who says we have to work together as a team. He means we have to work as he says.”

“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.”