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

by Lulu Miller

That the true path to progress is paved not with certainty but doubt, with being “open to revision.”

Sympathy for the idea that once you name something, you tend to stop looking at it.

downplay similarities between us and other animals, as a way of maintaining our spot at the top of our imaginary ladder.

like how certain bird species can remember the precise locations of thousands of seeds—they write it off as instinct, not intelligence.

“linguistic castration.” The way we use our tongues to disempower animals, the way we invent words to maintain our spot at the top.

“Because it’s a fact of life. Humans get things wrong.” She said people have been wrong about her, time and time again, for her whole life. She’s been misdiagnosed by doctors, misunderstood by classmates, by neighbors, by our parents, by me.

“Growing up,” she told me, “is learning to stop believing people’s words about you.”

there may be a kind of order-creating mechanism inside of us—that we come into the world predisposed to acquire a very specific set of beliefs about how to sort nature.

“There is another world, but it is in this one,”

All I knew was that underneath their skin were organs more similar to mine than I used to imagine, brains whirring with the very same ions as mine.

I NEVER WANT A LIFE WITHOUT THIS PERSON, was the thought.

get the promise that there are good things in store. Not because I deserve them. Not because I worked for them. But because they are as much a part of Chaos as destruction and loss. Life, the flip side of death. Growth, of rot.

To examine each object in the avalanche of Chaos with curiosity, with doubt.

I could not have pictured the walls of the refuge I will find with the emerald-eyed girl.

The other world within this one. The gridless place out the window where fish don’t exist and diamonds rain from the sky and each and every dandelion is reverberating with possibility.

I have come to believe that it is our life’s work to tear down this order, to keep tugging at it, trying to unravel it, to set free the organisms trapped underneath.

To remember that a category is at best a proxy; at worst, a shackle.

and think about the fact that even at its most hopeful, my measly brain could have never dreamt up something as infinitely intoxicating as her.