I do not think I have any uncharitable prejudice against the rattlesnake, still, I should not like to be one.

Don't you dare take the lazy way. It's too easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry. Don't let me catch you doing it! Now — look close at me so you will remember. Whatever you do, it will be you who do.

The delicate sensitivity of a frightened rattlesnake.

I'm not your mother's favorite dog I'm not the carpet you walk on I'm not one small atomic bomb I'm not any any any anything at all.

To the goggling unbeliever Texans say — as people always say about their mangier dishes — "but it's just like chicken, only tenderer." Rattlesnake is, in fact, just like chicken, only tougher.

Why, when all of my ancestors are snake-bitten, and I’m snake-bitten, and I warn my children to avoid snakes, what does that snake sound like accusing me of hate-teaching?

If you want to blame your parents for your own adult problems, you are entitled to blame the genes they gave you, but you are not entitled — by any facts I know — to blame the way they treated you.

"I don't blame you one iota for feeling as you do. If I were you I would undoubtedly feel just as you do."(...) You can say that and be 100 percent sincere, because if you were the other person you, of course, would feel just as he does (...) Suppose you had inherited the same body and temperament and mind (...) Suppose you had had his environment and experiences. You would then be precisely what he was - and where he was. For it is those things -and only those things - that made him what he was. (...) You deserve very little credit for being what you are - and remember, the people who come to you irritated, bigoted, unreasoning, deserve very little discredit for being what they are.

You aren't what happened to you.

Probably. That doesn't make you into one.

Our children are not us: they carry throwback genes and recessive traits and are subject right from the start to environmental stimuli beyond our control. And yet we are our children; the reality of being a parent never leaves those who have braved the metamorphosis.

It's not what you are that holds you back, it's what you think you're not

I am not your justification for existence.

And stop thinking you’re the superior ones! You’re just another drop in our gene pool! We’re all descended from peoples who thought they were kings and gods and who found themselves to be almost nothing at all in the end. Don’t let that be you.