80 Quotes by Sy Montgomery

But Christopher obeyed a higher calling: the intoxicating call of green grass and sunshine, the sweet scent of the earth on one of the last days of summer.

The word compassion means “with suffering.” To have compassion is to willingly join in suffering – to show those you love that you will not let them suffer.

Octopus slime is sort of a cross between drool and snot. But in a nice way. And it’s very useful. It helps to be slippery if you’re squeezing your body in and out of tight places. Slime keeps the octopus moist if it wants to emerge from the water, which some species of octopus do with surprisingly frequency in the wild.

Our kind has surely accomplished brilliant feats during our short time on this earth as a species. But before we poison, pollute, degrade and murder every other creature on the planet, we must learn to limit our numbers and our greed. This is the lesson that humans so desperately need to learn at this turning point in human history.

There was a tank of special flounder about fifteen feet away from the octopus tank,” he said. The fish were part of a study. But to the researchers’ dismay, the flounder started disappearing, one by one. One day they caught the culprit red-handed. The octopus had been slipping out of her tank and eating the flounder! When the octopus was discovered, Scott said, “she gave a guilty, sideways look and slithered away.

Love is the highest and best use of a life.

A lion is a mammal like us; an octopus is put together completely differently, with three hearts, a brain that wraps around its throat, and a covering of slime instead of hair. Even their blood is a different color from ours; it’s blue, because copper, not iron, carries its oxygen.

In his classic The Outermost House, American naturalist Henry Beston writes that animals “are not brethren, they are not underlings” but beings “gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.” They are, he writes, “other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.

Unlike the supply of dogs, the supply of good names isn’t limitless.