Crystal > Crystal's Quotes

“When I was seven years old, my family moved to North Carolina. When he was seven years old, Hugh’s family moved to the Congo. We had a collie and a house cat. They had a monkey and two horses named Charlie Brown and Satan. I threw stones at stop signs. Hugh threw stones at crocodiles. The verbs are the same, but he definitely wins the prize when it comes to nouns and objects.”
― David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

“Humankind is drawn to dogs because they are so like ourselves—bumbling, affectionate, confused, easily disappointed, eager to be amused, grateful for kindness and the least attention.”
― Patricia B. McConnell, The Other End of the Leash: Why We Do What We Do Around Dogs

“So I invite all of you to show our own species the same patience and compassion that we show dogs. After all, dogs seem to like us a lot, and I have the utmost respect for their opinion.”
― Patricia B. McConnell, The Other End of the Leash: Why We Do What We Do Around Dogs

“If you can change the way people think, she said. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. If you do that, you can change the way people live their lives. And that’s the only lasting thing you can create.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“The need of one human being for the approval of his fellow humans, the need for a certain cult of fellowship - a psychological, almost physiological need for approval of one's thought and action. A force that kept men from going off at unsocial tangents, a force that made for social security and human solidarity, for the working together of the human family.

Men died for that approval, sacrificed for that approval, lived lives they loathed for that approval. For without it man was on his own, an outcast, an animal that had been driven from the pack.
It had led to terrible things, of course - to mob psychology, to racial persecution, to mass atrocities in the name of patriotism or religion. But likewise it had been the sizing that held the race together, the thing that from the very start had made human society possible.

And Joe didn't have it. Joe didn't give a damn. He didn't care what anyone thought of him. He didn't care whether anyone approved or not.”
― Clifford D. Simak, City

“I learned a valuable lesson that day. And an enduring one, too, because it resonates with me still. Family is not just about who you appear to belong to, or what it says on your birth certificate, or who you look like, or even what they’d find if they studied your DNA. Family is found anywhere you are loved and cared for. That might mean friends or foster parents, a group or even a charity. What matters far more — so much more than chemistry or ancestry — is that precious bond, that reassurance that they won’t let you down.”
― Marina Chapman, The Girl With No Name: The Incredible True Story of a Child Raised by Monkeys

“When I tried to envision how my dogs would react to a system where they spent two-fifths of the year locked up in the sort of cages used to fly animals in the baggage compartment of airplanes, the first-month-of-gestation solution suddenly no longer seemed all that great.”
― Barry Estabrook, Pig Tales: An Omnivore's Quest for Sustainable Meat

“licentiousness has seldom produced the loss of liberty; but that the tyranny of rulers has almost always effected it.”
― James MacGregor Burns, The American Experiment: The Vineyard of Liberty, The Workshop of Democracy, and The Crosswinds of Freedom