“There are no simple words. I don't know why I thought I could hide anything behind language.”

“I don't know why, but there's always the part of you, the part that hides in the shadows protecting the self-destruct button, that doesn't ever want to leave the dark behind.”

“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.”

“Wouldn’t you leave a light on? Knowing what I knew and not knowing anything else at all, why would I want the darkness where the monsters hide?Because killers hide there too.”

“Is," "is," "is"—the idiocy of the word haunts me. If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense. I don't know what anything "is"; I only know how it seems to me at this moment.”

“I wouldn't mind leaving myself behind if I could, but I don't know the way out.”