Dana

“When I held them in my hands and tried to look into their eyes, I was close to something that transcended the limits of the known universe. That is how the eel question draws you in. The eels’ mystique becomes an echo of the questions all people carry within them: Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going?”
― Patrik Svensson, The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World

“People thought that being one of a kind made you special. No, it just made you lonely. What was special was belonging with someone else.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“The entire short story teeters on the brink of uncertainty. The narrative perspective shifts continually, nothing is truly known, things may be happening in the material world, or possibly only in Nathanael’s tormented mind. To Freud, the woman who turns out to be a robot and the theft of the eyes are also central symbols at the core of the uncanny; here is an example of the uncertainty about whether a creature is alive or dead, but also the fear of being robbed of one’s sight, of losing one’s ability to observe and experience the world as it truly is.”
― Patrik Svensson, The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World

“The earliest recorded use of feathers for fishing occurs in the third-century-A.D. writings of a Roman named Claudius Aelianus, who described Macedonian trout fishermen who tied “crimson red wool around a hook, and fix onto the wool two feathers which grow under a cock’s wattles.” And while the practice assuredly continued over the coming millennia, no texts on fly-fishing survive from the Dark Ages. Fly-tying didn’t reappear until 1496, when Wynken de Worde, a Dutch émigré running a newfangled printing press in Fleet Street in London, published A Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle, which included crude “recipes” for a dozen trout flies, one for each month, known by fly-fishing fanatics as the “Jury of Twelve.”
― Kirk Wallace Johnson, The Feather Thief