The Book Of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination With The Most Mysterious Creature In The Natural World Quotes
"Where it starts and where it ends is difficult to determine, since it eludes the usual measures of the world."
"The Sargasso Sea is like a dream: you can rarely pinpoint the moment you enter or exit; all you know is that you’ve been there."
"Life teems in the dark, like a nocturnal forest."
"Perhaps it doesn’t even realize it is a fish."
"The eel is, thus, a fish that transcends the piscine condition."
"It can migrate thousands of miles, unflagging and undaunted, before it suddenly decides it’s found a home."
"Seemingly lacking any sense of purpose, other than in its daily search for food and shelter."
"As though life was first and foremost about waiting and its meaning found in the gaps or in an abstract future that can’t be brought about by any means other than patience."
"What triggers this decision, we may never know, but once it has been made, the eel’s tranquil existence ends abruptly."
"It’s a long, ascetic journey, undertaken with an existential resolve that cannot be explained."
"You had to be quiet to make yourself part of the whole."
"Memory doesn’t allow colors that clash with the background."
"Because even people who trust in science and an orderly natural world sometimes want to leave a small, small opening for the unknowable."
"For now, at least, the eel remains something of a scientific enigma."
"It’s as though there were still life left in them."
"I wondered where to draw the line between life and death."
"The stream represented his roots, everything familiar he always returned to."
"Patience was apparently the first prerequisite. You had to give the eel your time."
"Since we are not allowed to dissect people, I have nothing to do with them."
"Every morning, Freud goes to meet the fishermen as they come into port with the catch of the day—baskets full of fat Adriatic eels—then heads straight to the laboratory and sets to work."
"My hands are stained by the white and red blood of the sea creatures, all I see when I close my eyes is the shimmering dead tissue, which haunts my dreams, and all I can think about are the big questions, the ones that go hand in hand with testicles and ovaries—the universal, pivotal questions."
"SO WHAT DID SIGMUND FREUD FIND IN TRIESTE? POSSIBLY, IF NOTHING else, an initial insight into how deeply some truths are hidden."
"Because while the narrow path might be the right one, sometimes the wide one is so much easier to walk."
"The world is an absurd place full of contradictions and existential confusion; only those who have a goal are ultimately able to find meaning."
"Existence comes first. The world is an absurd place full of contradictions and existential confusion; only those who have a goal are ultimately able to find meaning."
"The eels didn’t care about the eel question, and why would they? To them, it was never a question in the first place."
"Here, on the Swedish eel coast, only a few remain, and it’s a shrinking brotherhood, but their presence and profession have shaped life in this part of the world for a very long time."
"The system stems from a time when Skåne was still part of Denmark; the oldest extant documentation about it dates from 1511 and tells us that a certain Jens Holgersen Ulfstand of Glimmingehus purchased two åldrätter from the archbishop."
"The eel feast is a leftover from those days."
"WHAT KIND OF PERSON CHOOSES TO BECOME AN EEL FISHERMAN?"
"It’s really only the Basques who stubbornly refuse to give up."
"No one becomes an eel fisherman who doesn’t have it in his or her blood."
"An eel is never allowed to simply be an eel. It’s never allowed to just be."
"When you klumma for eel, you thread a needle with a long piece of extra-strong sewing thread and hold it in one hand while you hold a worm in the other."
"It was a gift from God in their hour of need, the salvation they had never stopped praying for."
"What was needed was the familiar. More specifically, the uncanny is the unique unease we experience when something we think we know or understand turns out to be something else."
"It didn’t tally with what we wanted the eel to be. The eel didn’t behave as we expected it to. Maybe we had gotten too close to it."
"WHAT MAKES A HUMAN DIFFERENT FROM AN ANIMAL? I KNEW NOTHING about that. The only thing I knew was that there was a difference and that it was irrevocable and immutable. A human is something other than an animal."
"Dad liked animals a lot, but sometimes he killed them. It wasn’t something he enjoyed, he took no pleasure in the violence, but he did what he thought was right."
"He stood there and took aim, but couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger."
"The eel is different from, for instance, the salmon, which sparkles and shimmers and makes wild dashes and daring jumps. The salmon comes off as a self-absorbed, vain fish. The eel seems more content."
"Perhaps the eel’s fate is easier to identify with than the salmon’s predestined lack of independence."
"Rachel Carson claimed that in the sea, deep down where the eel spawns and dies, time moves differently from how it does for us."
"To humans, the experience of time is inevitably tied to the process of aging, and aging follows a fairly predictable chronological trajectory."
"If there really is something eternal, or nearly eternal, the ocean is where we’ll find it."
"Nothing about my parents’ life was a given, of course. But nor was it chance. Strong forces had been involved. They had been willow leaves in a mighty current."
"We were completely unremarkable. We were amazingly unremarkable. That was the only thing that made us special."
"The current pushed back at every stroke, lifting the prow straight up."
"The trap spread out before us, hidden in the murky water, with its opening in the middle of the stream and its mesh bag like a secret room beneath the surface."
"We should be glad that knowledge has its limits."
"Science is much stricter than, for instance, philosophy or psychoanalysis in that regard."
"Perhaps there are things, like many others, destined never to be learnt before the world comes to its end."
"And yet, in this case, any knowledge comes with qualifications."
"The mystery is there to be solved, questions await their answers, but at the same time the riddle is what sparks and perpetuates interest."
"But even if we learn how, and what, and where, and when, will we ever know why?"
"It’s not eating," I told Dad. "It’s going to starve to death."
"I tried to imagine what it saw when it looked out through the glass, what it felt."
"When it comes to the eel, we can allow ourselves to ask banal questions, simply because the banal questions don’t always have immediate answers."
"And so the silver eel finally comes home to its birthplace, its Sargasso Sea, and at the same time, it disappears out of sight and our realm of knowledge."
"The problem you have chosen to explore is one that must be resolved in our time."
"Faith requires you to give up part of your logic and rationality."
"Life is changeable; that’s the first law of evolution. Life is also transient; that’s the first law of life."
"Rachel Carson was one of the first to realize this."
"That is the normal way of life: occasional goodbyes, not holocausts."
"If things carry on like this, there’s much to suggest that the number of species on our planet will be halved in just one hundred years."
"One of the many species inhabiting this planet has conquered it, and in so doing has caused the massive destruction of the habitats of all other species."
"Those of us alive today not only are witnessing one of the rarest events in life’s history, we are also causing it."
"The closer humanity gets to the eel, and the more it’s exposed to the influence of our modern living, the faster it dies."
"We still don’t know everything about the threat to the eel, but what we do know is enough to identify the only way of saving it: we have to leave it be."
"It’s hard to say. It’s the same problem that everyone attempting to understand the eel has been confronted with: The answer eludes us."
"People who, like Graham Swift, or his storyteller Tom Crick, want to believe that a world where everything’s explained is a world that has come to an end."
"Anyone who feels an eel should be allowed to remain an eel can no longer afford the luxury of also letting it remain a mystery."
"The mysteriousness of the eel has suddenly become its greatest enemy. If it is to survive, humans have to coax it out of the shadows and find answers to the remaining questions."