How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures

⚡️ 10 Quotes from the book

“You may have read that a goldfish grows in proportion to the size of its bowl. But unlike us, goldfish are indeterminate growers; if given the chance, they will grow until they die.”

copy text

“If goldfish are doomed in a bowl, they are unstoppable in a river. They do more than survive; they take over the whole place.”

copy text

“What does it mean to survive in the wild? You can’t do it without going wild yourself. We are all capable of reverting to a wilder state.”

copy text

“I predict I will always be in negotiation with my body, what it wants, and what I want of it.”

copy text

“Almost every system we exist in is cruel, and it is our job to hold ourselves accountable to a moral center separate from the arbitrary ganglion of laws that, so often, get things wrong.”

copy text

“Like a dutiful little trash compactor, I had digested my messy heap of an identity into a manageable lesson for people who were not like me.”

copy text

“I grew up thinking of immortality as something won with a drink or a bite or a pill, a static and irreversible state of being. But the immortal jellyfish has no notion of these tepid forevers. Its immortality is active. It is constantly aging in both directions, always reinventing itself, bell shrinking and expanding, tentacles retreating into flesh and wriggling out again. It is not living forever but reliving forever.”

copy text

“I am an organism like any other, we people and pigeons and bacteria experiencing homeostasis on the sidewalk.”

copy text

“Sometimes you don’t need to pull yourself apart to start over. Metamorphosis isn’t always a full-body thing.”

copy text

“All across the bay, as far as the eye can see: baby medusas, tender haloed fringe and translucent clovers, all rising like fallen blossoms reuniting with a tree. Summer, happening in reverse. All of us moving toward life. All of us refusing to die.”

copy text