Ferona

“The first day you visited me, you said you’re constantly telling yourself, ‘I’ve got to get out of here, I’ve got to get out of here.’ You said this meant ‘Run for your life!’ ”

“Yeah. I guess you could say that’s what I was feeling as I sat here crying. Please! Please let me run for my life! Please let me out of here! Please, let me go! Please don’t keep me penned up here for the rest of my life! I’ve GOTTA run! I can’t STAND this!”

“But these aren’t thoughts you can share with your classmates.”

“These aren’t thoughts I could have shared with myself two weeks ago.”

“You wouldn’t have dared to look at them.”

“No, if I’d looked at them, I would’ve said, ‘My God, what’s wrong with me? I must have a disease of some kind!’ ”

“These are exactly the kinds of thoughts that Jeffrey wrote in his journal again and again. ‘What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with me? There must be something terribly wrong with me that I’m unable to find joy in the world of work.’ Always he wrote, ‘What’s wrong with me, what’s wrong with me, what’s wrong with me?’ And of course all his friends were forever saying to him, ‘What’s wrong with you, what’s wrong with you, what’s wrong with you that you can’t get with this wonderful program?’ Perhaps you understand for the first time now that my role here is to bring you this tremendous news, that there’s nothing wrong here with YOU. You are not what’s wrong. And I think there was an element of this understanding in your sobs: ‘My God, it isn’t me!”
― Daniel Quinn, My Ishmael

“That moment of awakening was very sweet to him. The freshness of the morning, the scent of everything at the day’s rebirth, the first beams of the sun upon a treetop near, and a pigeon rising into the air suddenly, all delighted him. Even the rough scent of the body of the cub in his arms seemed to him delicious.

At that moment all human customs and institutions seemed to him nothing but folly; for said he, “I would exchange all my life as a man for my happiness now, and even now I retain almost all of the ridiculous conceptions of a man. The beasts are happier and I will deserve that happiness as best I can.”
― David Garnett, Lady Into Fox by David Garnett

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”
― Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod

“People were anxious in graduate school, and not just students. The habits and habitat of modern life are simply not evolutionarily stable. Metal and plastic. Electric lights blotting out stars. Ten-story buildings blocking sun and moon. Cars honking and everything else ringing, beeping, and buzzing until we can’t even hear aspen leaves quaking. Think about all the changes that our species has experienced in the last several thousand years. Too many. Too fast.

A person would be crazy if she weren’t anxious. Maybe I was the only one in that university town with blood-dampened hair, but I was not the only one with anxiety caused by modern habits and habitats that were not evolutionarily stable. Take an auditorium filled with university professors and doctoral students and pull them outside in groups: the ones addicted to food, tobacco, diet pills, alcohol, marijuana, sex, hard stuff, antidepressants, antipsychotics; the ones who couldn’t stop pulling their hair, or picking their face, or cutting their arms. The perpetual psychiatrist appointments, the suicide attempts, the television binges. Maybe I wasn’t any better than they were, but I wasn’t any worse.”
― Catherine Raven, Fox & I