How To Be A Good Creature: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals

by Sy Montgomery

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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.

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.