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I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.
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Ray Bradbury (Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You)
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Success is a little like wrestling a gorilla. You don't quit when you're tired. You quit when the gorilla is tired.
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Robert Strauss
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An errand is getting a tank of gas or picking up a carton of milk or something. It is not getting chased by flying purple pyromaniac gorillas hurling incendiary poo!
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Jim Butcher (Blood Rites (The Dresden Files, #6))
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His name is Marcus: he is four and a half and possesses that deep gravity and seriousness that only small children and mountain gorillas have ever been able to master.
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Neil Gaiman (Anansi Boys)
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A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything. Was boredom unknown to them? This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends, only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity. Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs — something, anything.... Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.
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Emil M. Cioran (The Trouble With Being Born)
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You are loved. Massively. Ferociously. Unconditionally. The Universe is totally freaking out about how awesome you are. It’s got you wrapped in a warm gorilla hug of adoration. It wants to give you everything you desire. It wants you to be happy. It wants you to see what it sees in you.
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Jen Sincero (You Are a Badass®: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life)
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Hair on a man's chest is thought to denote strength. The gorilla is the most powerful of bipeds and has hair on every place on his body except for his chest.
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Anton Szandor LaVey
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And people who believe in God think God has put human beings on earth because they think human beings are the best animal, but human beings are just an animal and they will evolve into another animal, and that animal will be cleverer and it will put human beings into a zoo, like we put chimpanzees and gorillas into a zoo. Or human beings will all catch a disease and die out or they will make too much pollution and kill themselves, and then there will only be insects in the world and they will be the best animal.
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Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time)
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It's hard to put into words. Gorillas are not complainers. We're dreamers, poets, philosophers, nap takers.
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Katherine Applegate (The One and Only Ivan (The One and Only #1))
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Most people today think they belong to a species that can be master of its destiny. This is faith, not science. We do not speak of a time when whales or gorillas will be masters of their destinies. Why then humans?
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John Gray (Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals)
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I had never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla.
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Robert M. Sapolsky
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A lion does not flinch at laughter coming from a hyena. A gorilla does not budge from a banana thrown at it by a monkey. A nightingale does not stop singing its beautiful song at the intrusion of an annoying woodpecker.
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Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
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Great people will always be mocked by those who feel smaller than them. A lion does not flinch at laughter coming from a hyena. A gorilla does not budge from a banana thrown at it by a monkey.
A nightingale does not stop singing its beautiful song at the intrusion of an annoying woodpecker. Whenever you should doubt your self-worth, remember the lotus flower. Even though it plunges to life from beneath the mud,
it does not allow the dirt that surrounds it to affect its growth or beauty.
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Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
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Hestia looked at Eli like he was dressed in a gorilla suit and immediately morphed into a Rottweiler the size of a lion. “You still think I should wear clothes,” she challenged Eli.
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Frank Lambert (Xyz)
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My visitors are often surprised when they see the TV Mack put in my domain. They seem to find it odd, the sight of a gorilla staring at tiny humans in a box. Sometimes I wonder, though: Isn't the way they stare at me, sitting in my tiny box, just as strange?
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Katherine Applegate (The One and Only Ivan (The One and Only #1))
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Every animal on the planet attracts mates with the goal of reproduction. Frogs swell their bodies. Male gorillas beat their chests. Have you ever watched a male lobster rise up on the tips of his legs and snap his claws, demanding female attention? Attraction is the first element of all animal reproduction, humans included.
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Becca Fitzpatrick (Hush, Hush (Hush, Hush, #1))
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[I]n Africa I was a member of a family—of a sort of family that the people of your culture haven't known for thousands of years. If gorillas were capable of such an expression, they would tell you that their family is like a hand, of which they are the fingers. They are fully aware of being a family but are very little aware of being individuals. Here in the zoo there were other gorillas—but there was no family. Five severed fingers do not make a hand.
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Daniel Quinn (Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit (Ishmael, #1))
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Yet the upcoming year was going to be a new phase of my life. I would get to follow my big
brother to the big house. I had reached that golden age of six. Finally, I was going to experience
the real deal. This was no appetizer, or tater tots, or French fries. This was the whole Ore-Ida. I would be amongst thechaos like all the neighborhood kids. Everyone that knew Jerry would get to know me, too.
Since we were at Aunt Kathy’s, I had to curtail my exuberance. We had nothing like the freedom at mom’s shack. So, I did my best to remain out of sight. But those efforts were futile. School was just hours away. I really couldn’t contain myself without medication or God forbid, a good old-fashioned ass beating.
Well, Aunt Kathy implored me to settle down. She kept issuing threat after threat with such statements, “Boy, do I needto beat the black off of you,” or “Gorilla will be your name when
I’m finish!” Yes, I got the message but beating my butt wasn’t going to be enough. Heck, I had been waiting for three long, long years just to join Jerry. Anything short of a bullet wasn’t going to stop me.
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Author Harold Phifer (My Bully, My Aunt, & Her Final Gift)
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Usually I spare myself from the news, because if it’s not propaganda, then it’s one threat or another exaggerated to the point of absurdity, or it’s the tragedy of storm-quake-tsunami, of bigotry and oppression misnamed justice, of hatred passed off as righteousness and honor called dishonorable, all jammed in around advertisements in which a gecko sells insurance, a bear sells toilet tissue, a dog sells cars, a gorilla sells investment advisers, a tiger sells cereal, and an elephant sells a drug that will improve your lung capacity, as if no human being in America any longer believes any other human being, but trusts only the recommendations of animals.
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Dean Koontz (Deeply Odd (Odd Thomas, #6))
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For a Coming Extinction
Gray whale
Now that we are sending you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing
I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were made
On another day
The bewilderment will diminish like an echo
Winding along your inner mountains
Unheard by us
And find its way out
Leaving behind it the future
Dead
And ours
When you will not see again
The whale calves trying the light
Consider what you will find in the black garden
And its court
The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas
The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless
And fore-ordaining as stars
Our sacrifices
Join your word to theirs
Tell him
That it is we who are important
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W.S. Merwin