“How little we really know about the life all around us. Would we be so cavalier and ruthless with it if we understood it better?”

“Can we be sure that they are incapable of the feelings or sentiments that are believed to place them on a lower scale than humans? Do we deny sensitivity to all of the so-called lower orders to blunt, protect, and, ultimately, deny our own? We will see that bees can grieve over teh loss of a queen, sound war cries or hum with contentment; they can be angry, docile, ferocious, playful, aggressive, appear happy, or utter pitiful sounds of distress. are these not emotions akin to ours, merely expressed differently?”

“The bee is domesticated but not tamed.”

“For loss is what we live with all the time. / None knows this better than the mind should know, the mind / that wanders, and cannot tell our name, itself / all seeds and survivals, little else, poor blind.”

“I liked the fact she understood how we all have little secret habits that seem normal enough to us, but which we know better than to mention out loud.”

“We were, all of us, prisoners of our character, unable to alter our true inner natures. When we said we had changed, what had only really changed was our luck. Put us in the same circumstances as our previous folly and suddenly we’d revert, all of us, to what we were. That’s what I believed”

“We fear men so much, because we fear God so little.”