“This time I felt it was impossible that they could entertain further doubt as to my true condition. Alas, I did not yet know the blindness of orangutans!”

“I racked my brains to discover some sense in the events I had witnessed. I needed this intellectual exercise to escape from the despair that haunted me, to prove to myself that I was a man, I mean a man from Earth, a reasoning creature who made it a habit to discover a logical explanation for the apparently miraculous whims of nature, and not a beast hunted down by highly developed apes.”

“Des hommes raisonnables? Des hommes détenteurs de la sagesse? Des hommes inspirés par l'espirit? ... Non, ce n'est pas possible.”

“But once an original book has been written-and no more than one or two appear in a century-men of letters imitate it, in other words, they copy it so that hundreds of thousands of books are published on exactly the same theme, with slightly different titles and modified phraseology. This should be able to be achieved by apes, who are essentially imitators, provided, of course, that they are able to make use of language.”

“I left the bed as she had left it, unmade and rumpled, coverlets awry, so that her body's print might rest still warm beside my own.Until the next day I did not go to bathe, I wore no clothes and did not dress my hair, for fear I might erase some sweet caress.That morning I did not eat, nor yet at dusk, and put no rouge nor powder on my lips, so that her kiss might cling a little longer.I left the shutters closed, and did not open the door, for fear the memory of the night before might vanish with the wind.”

“When he came back, I hid my face within my hands. He said: "Fear nothing. Who has seen our kiss? --Who saw us? The night and the moon.""And the stars and the first flush of dawn. The moon has seen its visage in the lake, and told it to the water 'neath the willows. The water told it to the rower's oar."And the oar has told it to the boat, and the boat has passed the secret to the fisher. Alas! alas! if that were only all! But the fisher told the secret to a woman."The fisher told the secret to a woman: my father and my mother and my sisters, and all of Hellas now shall know the tale.”

“I like the imp / in impossibility ”