yuka

• Since language is epically younger than both thought and experience, "wooly mammoth" means, to a human brain, something more like time. It might mean time even more than "time" does, since a brain's chance of holding any span of years is laughable. Few bodies have felt the real pull of a century and fewer brains can grasp ten, even in dreams. What, asks the brain, is tangible in one hundred years, let alone a century repeated four hundred times? (14)
• Of all the images that make our world, animal images are particularly buried inside us. We feel the pull of them before we know how to name them, or how to even fully see them. it is as if they are always waiting, crude sketches of themselves, in the recesses of our bodies. As if every animal a human brain has ever seen, it has swallowed. (15)
• Survival is hiding his soft human body and clocking the heartier megafauna as they move and mate and perish. Imagine the detail he holds inside himself after a lifetime of fiery looking. Then think of five thousand such lifetimes, all spent on that steppe and at this pitch of watching. Good God, what that amount of witness must do to a human's insides. (16)

the wolf of gubbio

• Mostly, the books of beasts used the Wolf to illustrate the most lupine of human sins. You must hate the sins of the Wolf, the bestiaries said -- the sins of rogues, apostates, and highwaymen -- as they are sins too cunning to simply be feared. Hear these words on the Wolf, sinners, and then think upon the Wolf that might, at any moment, ravage the Lamb inside you.

ganda

• What was a human mind to do with those comma-shaped ears and their distance from that squat, obscene horn? Who in Europe was prepared for those surprisingly small eyes fused to its cheeks, like mica bits in dirty marble? Not to mention the haunted way it rose to find its anger, seething rather than charging, as if the monster inside it just wanted to be left alone. (34)
• Dürer has managed to represent both bodies -- biological Ganda versus mythic RHINOCERON -- and both realities -- the natural versus the imagined -- with a timeless artistry. (37)
• Dürer's Rhinocerus depicts the art of living in a modern world that can import gigantic creatures that we'll never fully understand. Rhinocerus depicts the unnatural reality of being Homo sapiens in a modern world this monstrous, this unknowable, and this full of utter nonsense. The rhinoceros and the idea of a rhinoceros. Dürer's trick was to harness the loaded moment in which human imagination -- destructive, mutative, and tricky -- fights the realities of our planet and, real or not, bests them. (42)

sackerson

jeoffry

vogel staar

• This sonic sense of the tribal might explain why, when we see a trilling mob of ten thousand starlings -- each bird watching its seven closest neighbors for the slightest change of speed or angle, dodging hawks en masse with shrieks and chips, beak beats and hard whistles -- we find ourselves calling that group not a flock or a swarm or a drove, but a collective noun that's drenched in sound: a "murmuration". (68-69)
• These caprices, though stuck inside the pinfold of common practice, are what made him a star. As the old German saying goes, the music of Bach gave us God's word, Beethoven's gave us God's fire, but Mozart's gave God's laughter to the world. He found the accidents in song that reminded music to glorify the playful, the mischievous, the pop! that sends Jack exploding from the box after so much measured cranking. (71)
• This gives the courted female two distinct pleasures: she can lean on the familiarity of the song structure, but she can also hear the freestyle within the movement -- a report of her lover's unique mind. (72)
• That's how Mozart grew up -- chasing melodies as they flew by him, hunting for the ways each note might pivot into something new. (75)
• Notice how, after the exposition, the tune dips treacherously into D minor before moving forward in a new major key. It sounds as if, for a quick measure, a little devil has whispered something shocking into the melody's ear. (78)
• In the poem, Mozart imagines the "little fool," unaware that it is dead, looking down at Mozart and whistling fondly. Now up in heaven, the songbird sings for free, as has always been its custom. By the last stanza, the bird has already sung long enough to forget its keeper and collaborator. And now the maestro is left on Earth to rhyme alone (albeit masterfully, Mozart brags). (80)
• For so much is left unanswered when a man falls from heaven and writes Don Giovanni. Or when the wingbeats of countless tiny creatures lift upward and sound like thunder as they block out the sun. When five hundred starlings drop from the sky into shallow ponds without making a sound. When a genius buys a songbird because, despite his noisy life, something i missing. (81)

harriet

• If we can adapt to an ever-changing island, who says we can't adapt for love, you think. Adaptations, after all, are nothing more than labor: fueled by chemistry, successful only when lauded by a mate. What makes one special, what makes one species, what makes the only changes on the earth that matter -- it's always something love-born: a horn, a neck, a killer claw. // For we were not born to mate, wallow, and die. We were not born to duplicate the image God threw together long ago, before the earth smoothed or the stars pulled ships through the wet dark. We were born to move -- by leap or creep. To riff and code on a vector. To surprise God as we catch up to the morphing rocks and malleable seas on our own volition. (87)
• After the cave salamander wills away his eyes, he feels a gull's discarded feather float across his tail. He spends the rest of his life begging his sight to return. (91)
• When someone puts a barb in your heart, the worst thing you can do is pull it out. (94)

war pigs

• And where the wayward pigeon heart warms itself by rushing home at seven hundred beats per minute, the trapped human heart keeps warm by calling to hearts that beat for it elsewhere... (98)

jumbo ii

• Old Hannibal fell in love with an elephant cow in Pittsburgh, which the circus immediately promoted: Behold the Pachyderm Romeo and Juliet! After she was sold, he stopped eating, went on a whiskey bender and killed another keeper. The trial judge acquitted Old Hannibal, saying the keeper must have mistreated him. And besides, what can you expect of a fellow whose heart has just been broken? (112)

four horsemen

• But when a man puts a burning number twenty-eight in his brain and bears down on it with all his heart -- until a horse can read it in his fists, breath, face, and feet -- how could that number possibly be incorrect? (142)
• After five thousand years of shading the horse from fear ( for our own interests), we still cannot conquer it for him. We've spent fifty-six million years swallowing our human fear, but his whole body still revolves around it. Fear is the lens with which a horse sees the world; it's moved him over six continents. Not the grace or power or intelligence we claim to prize in him, but this primordial fear, as old as either species. And if we've been close to his fear all this time, what did we do with our own? // Look at him looking. Look at him searching us. What does this giant eye, set upon us for so very long, see that we still cannot? (149)

mike

arabella

• For nothing says "spider' more than this built-in vigilance, this innate knowledge of what pushes her into the earth and what lifts her away from it. Her legs, claws, mouth, the silk she unspools from inside herself, they all understand -- with the hair-trigger sensitivity that comes from eons of experiments -- the facts of our massive planet trying to collide with her body. (161-2)
• And alongside all the work of the floating men, her work was weighty and familiar -- a lifeline tailor-made for the people of earth. // For a spider in the center of her web is less distant from you than a man backflipping through a spaceship in his underwear. ... For the spider in space still only knows a garden sun. She lifts the same eight unsheathed legs that tread any apple branch. She isn't an honorary Doctor of Science or a Fellow at the American Astronomical Society. She's never seen the earth while standing on its moon. // For a spider in space has no title, just the sweet name of one of our daughters. When we speak it, the name makes the sound of a bell in the air. (168-9)

lancelot

• But still, my here was never without an animal representation. More than people and more than machines, false animals inhabited my field of vision (even though they could never return my gaze). It is important for me to remember that these animals were, essentially, fact-less. But because they were omnipresent and because they outnumbered everything else, this was the universe -- an absolute onslaught of fake animal presence was every fiber of my here. (178)
• The here and there of Lancelot grow together in my place, in the parts of my mind that -- at the site of my beginning -- were pulled back and rotated to sprout an outrageously new thing. There's a distinct possibility that every time I write about an animal, I am only writing about him - which might also mean, horrifyingly, that I'm only writing about myself. (185)

koko

osama

• We are now beyond predation; that is the myth of humans. It's a lonely understanding, if you think on it: the easiest predator to know is the predator within us, and the only creatures we give the right to devour us are creatures just like ourselves. No tiger hiding in the darkness, no white whale. Only an embassy bomber with a soft skull, no claws, and dull teeth, although he is named after a lion. (199-200)

celia

• In her hybrid mother's womb, the clone's lung cells mistakenly built an awful extra lobe, which lodged in her brand-new throat. The kid was born struggling for air and soon died of self-strangulation. Lungs seem the trickiest parts to clone from a mammal; they're what killed Dolly the sheep as well. How fitting that the most difficult nature to re-create in a lab is the breath of life. (210)

cecil