Education had been easy. Learning things had been harder.

The trouble is you can shut your eyes but you can’t shut your mind.

People were people, even if they had four legs and had called themselves names like Dangerous Beans, which is the kind of name you gave yourself if you learned to read before you understood what all the words actually meant.

Its useful to go out of this world and see it from the perspective of another one.

Life is just chemicals. A drop here, a drip there, everything's changed. A mere dribble of fermented juices and sudenlly you're going to live another few hours.

Studies have shown that an ant can carry one hundred times its own weight, but there is no known limit to the lifting power of the average tiny eighty-year-old Spanish peasant grandmother.

"It would seem that you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever" he said. "Have you thought of going into teaching?"