Talk to Me Quotes

“And do you know where sausages come from?” The question surprised him. Sausage was meat and meat was inside everything that moved. The STORE, he said. She translated and the man laughed. She said, “He means before that, Sam, before the store?” THEY KILL PIGS, he said. She said the words aloud. The man laughed again. “He’s amazing,” he said to her. “He really is. But tell me, Sam, who kills them, who kills the pigs?” The simplest sign, a single finger pointed right at him: YOU. “Me? I’ve never killed anything in my life.” But he just shook his head, shook his head no, because that wasn’t the truth.”
― T. Coraghessan Boyle, Talk to Me

“People outside the field couldn’t fathom the depth of communication apes were capable of, though they were willing to admit that their dogs showed moods and desires, barking at the door or fetching the leash when they wanted to go out, for instance, or that their cats’ mewing served half a dozen different purposes, but what they failed to appreciate was that apes were of a different order altogether. Dogs and cats had been bred for thousands of generations to weed out the undesirable genes, domesticated to create an all but emotionally neutered animal designed to serve human needs, but apes came straight out of the wild. They were independent. Resentful of captivity. And if you stared into their eyes you saw yourself staring right back. To put Sam in the category of a dog or cat was demeaning—and beyond that, uniformed and unimaginative”
― T. Coraghessan Boyle, Talk to Me

“was something he was just going to have to live with, and so what if it was every minute of every day for the rest of his life?”
― T. Coraghessan Boyle, Talk to Me

“Chimps could live to be fifty and more, but once they’d been infected with the AIDS virus or one strain or another of hepatitis or had electrodes implanted in their brains or cancerous cells injected into their organs, they were damaged goods, useless for further experiments, and could look forward to spending the rest of their years on this earth confined to cages, without stimulus, without love or even the most rudimentary kind of interaction with people or members of their own species, too valuable in terms of breeding and supply-and-demand to be euthanized.”
― T. Coraghessan Boyle, Talk to Me

“Are animals self-aware? That was one of the big questions in the field of animal consciousness and the evidentiary standard was the mirror test, in which a sleeping animal—elephant, dog, crow, human child, ape—was tagged on the face with a bright-colored sticker and then, on awakening, presented with a mirror. If the animal noticed the sticker and reached up to examine it, to remove it, this was proof that it recognized itself as a discrete individual, which in turn meant it exhibited a higher level of consciousness. Dogs failed, cats failed, but elephants, porpoises, crows, apes and human children passed easily, and Sam was so smart he could have conducted the tests himself.”
― T. Coraghessan Boyle, Talk to Me

“raised him as if he were their own child, which created a bond that had more to do with human endocrinology—with love—than with science.”
― T. Coraghessan Boyle, Talk to Me