How to Be a Good Creature: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals

I often wish I could go back in time and tell my young, anxious self that my dreams weren't in vain and my sorrows weren't permanent. I can't do that, but I can do something better. I can tell you that teachers are all around to help you; with four legs or two or eight or even none; some with internal skeletons, some without. All you have to do is recognize them as teachers and be ready to hear their truths.

Love is the highest and best use of a life.

Knowing someone who belongs to another species can enlarge your soul in surprising ways.

I am still learning how to be a good creature. Though I try earnestly, I often fail. But I am having a great life trying...

This is the gift great souls leave us when they die. They enlarge our hearts. They leave us a greater capacity for love.

...one of the most heartbreaking conditions of life on Earth is that most of the animals we love... die so long before we do.

A far worse mistake than misreading an animal's emotions is to assume the animal hasn't any emotions at all.

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.

Being friends with an octopus-whatever that friendship meant to her-has shown me that our world, and the worlds around and within it, is aflame with shades of brilliance we cannot fathom

most of my teachers have been animals. What have animals taught me about life? How to be a good creature.

Love is not changed by death,” read the quote by British poet Edith Sitwell, “and nothing is lost, and in the end, all is harvest.

Thousands of billions of mothers—from the gelatinous ancestors of Octavia, to my own mother—have taught their kind to love, and to know that love is the highest and best use of a life. Love alone matters, and makes its object worthy. And love is a living thing, even if Octavia’s eggs were not.

emotions aren’t confined to humans. A far worse mistake than misreading an animal’s emotions is to assume the animal hasn’t any emotions at all.

teachers are all around to help you: with four legs or two or eight or even none; some with internal skeletons, some without. All you have to do is recognize them as teachers and be ready to hear their truths.

You never know, even when life looks hopeless, what might happen next. It could be that something wonderful is right around the corner.

The world, I realized, brimmed even fuller with life than I had expected, rich with the souls of tiny creatures who may love their lives as much as we love ours.

In captivity, octopuses enjoy toys, often the same ones with which children play. Octopuses like to take apart and put together Mr. Potato Head. They play with Legos. They’ll unscrew the lids to jars to get a tasty crab inside—but they enjoy manipulating objects so much, they’ll often screw the lid back on when they’re through. To keep the many octopuses he’s known occupied, Wilson, an engineer and inventor, created a series of nesting Plexiglas boxes with different locks. Octopuses enjoyed

All you have to do is recognize them as teachers and be ready to hear their truths.

Even in the wake of tragedy, we could not have felt more amazed had we been visited by an angel that Christmas morning. When the angel met the shepherds in Bethlehem, the shepherds "were sore afraid." When I was a child, that phrase had always seemed odd to me...but now that I have thought more deeply about these words of scripture, it seems to me that the angels must have been more like our Christmas weasel: glorious in purity, strength, and holy perfection.