Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life

by Lulu Miller

After meeting Joshua, David renounced his love of beauty, declaring that the dull and ugly flowers—the dandelions (Taraxacum officinale) and buttercups (Ranunculus acris)—held better clues to nature’s blueprint. “The little ones,” he wrote, “even though not beautiful, meant more to me than a hundred big ones all of a kind.

Maybe it is not mad, after all. Maybe it is the quiet work of believing in Good. Of believing in a warmth, which you know does not exist in the stars, to exist in the hearts of fellow humans. Maybe it is something like trust.

it dawned on me that perhaps my dad had steered me astray with his insistence on nose-to-the-ants humility. Perhaps the greatest gift ever bestowed on us by evolution is the ability to believe we are more powerful than we are.

Strychnine.

he killed jane stanford???!!??!!??!??

Aosta was a sort of sanctuary city for people with disabilities, both mental and physical. For centuries, the Catholic Church had provided shelter, food, and care to people who had been rejected by their families because of their condition. And many of these people had ended up becoming skilled workers, in the fields or in kitchens; many of them ended up falling in love, getting married, having children. What had emerged was a sort of upside-down town. A town where the abnormal was normal, where people often disabled by society received the support that allowed them to flourish.

Your mom? Absolutely. A fish.

“When you give up the stars you get a universe. So what happens when you give up the fish?”

She said she had sympathy for the fish, then. Sympathy for the idea that once you name something, you tend to stop looking at it.