Wildness in animals is a curious thing to us humans. Isn't that why people watch Animal Planet? Escape. Maybe that's why we watch. Animal behavior is elemental. It takes us back to a simpler time.

Humans will believe anything you say provided you do not exhibit the smallest shadow of diffidence; like animals, they can detect the smallest crack in your confidence before you express it. The trick...

I didn't ask why anybody would want to risk the electric two-step on the tracks because, as police, all three of us knew that there wasn't anything so stupid that somebody wouldn't try it sooner or...

If a gift, favor, or service incorporates all three features of meaningfulness, unexpectedness, and customization, it can become a formidable source of change.

You're trying to convince me? The one who has a second apartment two blocks from her first apartment just so she can get away from her rabbit for a couple of hours a day?

The more the feeling of incapacity and the lack of genuine will increase, the more submission or obsessive desire to please one's whims and insistence on choosing proliferates.

Ridicule was a better defense than truth.

What might have happened to them to make them the way they were? It did not change what they now did, but it changed, profoundly, how he perceived their motivations, their place in the world.

You can do terrible things when you don't know who you are...

With the exercise of a little care, the nettle could be made useful; it is neglected and it becomes hurtful. It is exterminated. How many men resemble the nettle! He added with a pause: There are no...

Of course, people will laugh at you, but people laugh at a great many things so there is no need to take it personally.

The amorality of nature is accepted, whether it takes the form of a monsoon, an elephant in musth, or a disease; but being subjected helplessly to the will of others is not, for human behavior always...

Fanatics always seem to have the same scrubbed and staring look about them. They have the look of people who do not masturbate, but who think about it almost all the time.

Who but a drunk, I wonder looking back, could sit on the porch alone and get in an argument?

There are rumors about the depraved and perverted practices of the pulchritudinous protestant puritan plutocratic penis - people priesthood, of shadowy bacchanalian polyamorous practices. ... I...

Left-handed people are born of the devil.

Never try to understand the students. They hate it. They would much rather be tragically misunderstood, wallow in self-pity, stew in their own — That's enough, Phineas, said Dumbledore.

It's poor judgment to call anything by a name. We don't know what a hobgoblin or a vampire or a troll is. Could be lots of things. You can't heave them into categories with labels and say they'll act...

you used to do that. If you hid your face, you thought we couldn't see you just because you couldn't see us.