Alfie and Me Quotes

“But when will we prove ourselves worthy of a world that we so desperately need to love?”
― Carl Safina, Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe

“For the Nuu-chah-nulth (formerly Nootka) people of the Pacific Northwest, a person who needs help and does not ask for it is not admired for self-sufficiency but instead is considered unkind, because honoring mutual dependence is seen as fundamental.”
― Carl Safina, Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe

“Each animal knows way more than you do,”
― Carl Safina, Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe

“The little things are the big things. The moments pass.”
― Carl Safina, Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe

“The sacred lies in the mosaic of the everyday. Attend, in great detail, as you again fill the bird feeders for the morning. As”
― Carl Safina, Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe

“A forest is not just a bricolage of trees; it is an immensity of functional relationships and feedbacks whereby each thing makes other things possible within the dynamic and constantly adjusting suites of entities and behaviors. A tropical reef is not just coral polyps plus fish but thousands of finely inter-depending life forms in their sunlit fluid environment. A species is not just a pool of DNA; it is all the relationships that create and maintain its node in its network, even as its existence influences the network. A mind is not just the brain; a mind is a feeling experience arising somehow out of the brain's matter and energy. A mind is an emergent entity, perhaps the universe's most complex emergent function.”
― Carl Safina, Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe

“As the offspring of Platonist-Abrahamic de-enchantment of nature, science bears the birth scar of a world unvalued. Through a kind of emotionally detached childhood, science grew strong but felt little love for its mother, Nature. Consequently, science has had a brilliant career, but as it matured it has tended to deny paternity for two unintended twin offspring: sufferings inflicted and damages done.”
― Carl Safina, Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe

“relational fabric and all things, having no clear boundaries. Powers act not from remote distance but with present, highly tangible agency. Any event can be a manifestation of such forces. Winds, lands, waters, plants, animals—all are sacred, and all aspects of existence are bound by spiritual threads into a tight weave of power. Nature is a “watchful and possessive” second society of physical and spirit forces in which people live. No wilderness is desolate, because nowhere are you ever alone. Indigenous people move in landscapes whose creatures, plants, and weather continually decide what to do.”
― Carl Safina, Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe

“Indigenous people widely perceive all of existence as neither material nor spiritual but always both simultaneously. Their spirit-infused natural world tends to be conscious, feeling, and forceful. Spirits occupy the”
― Carl Safina, Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe

“And so began a prolonged, unplanned captivity.”
― Carl Safina, Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe

“And what I knew—that she didn’t know—was that one night of hopping around on the ground would likely be all she’d get. Our neighborhood was home to raccoons and great horned owls and the occasional fox—not to mention several free-ranging cats, who posed perhaps the greatest threat. The cats kill chipmunks and mice and birds, all of which are food for owls. A cat could kill a baby owl, too.”
― Carl Safina, Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe

“The human power to change things exceeds our power to simply put things back as they were. So proceed thoughtfully; reversing course may not be an option.”
― Carl Safina, Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe

“Alfie accepted any offered animal food, from crickets on up. Sometimes she shared our meal when we were eating fish or eggs. She grew to be one very healthy, vigorous, plump little owl. Caring for Alfie meant that I needed to find a reliable main source of food. I decided on a supplier whose website promised that their frozen mice had been raised with high standards of cleanliness in a low-stress environment, cared for with respect, and killed humanely.”
― Carl Safina, Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe

“Then, in ancient Greece, something happened. Plato posited an ideal realm outside of space and time and disparaged our existence in the flawed material world. Rather than attend to the unity of all things, this view segregated the spiritual from the material. If I may oversimplify: in most ancient and traditional beliefs, the world comprised the most holy and important things; in the European, or “Western,” perspective that developed after Plato, the world was the least holy, least important thing. The Western view has globalized, and the global economy reflects this Western devaluation of the world. And here we are.”
― Carl Safina, Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe

“Our doggies, Chula and Jude, were preadapted to being friendly with small birds who could only flutter. They had grown up around our two small rescued parrots and our little flock of free-roving chickens. The training I devised stemmed from a simple premise. I presumed the dogs would chase because of curiosity and impulse, rather than hunger. If I did the catching for them and let them investigate at the closest range, it should quench their curiosity.”
― Carl Safina, Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe

“I prefer “male” and “female” to terms like “bull,” “cow,” “boar,” “sow,” “bitch,” and so on. “Father and mother” rather than “sire and dam.” Those labels perpetuate bias and baggage, and I find that dropping them lets me see things that the labels work to deny.”
― Carl Safina, Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe

“This wasn’t the first orphaned owl to come my way. In my twenties I had helped found a wildlife-rehabilitation group, I was currently a university ecologist, and I’d had permits for wildlife rehab, falconry, and bird banding.”
― Carl Safina, Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe

“My easy intimacy with an owl helped me understand what is possible when we soften our sense of contrast at the species boundary. My growing relationship with her made me want to better understand how people have viewed humanity’s relationship with nature throughout history. Why do we happen to have a strained relationship with the natural world? How have other cultures throughout time and around the globe seen humanity’s place in the order of things? Turns out, it’s complicated. Since earliest times, various peoples have developed differing realms of thought about the human role in the world. Beliefs and values that developed in antiquity among Indigenous, Asian, African, and Western cultures retain astounding power to clarify the sources of illumination and darkness that cast their light and shadows across our lives today.”
― Carl Safina, Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe

“ONE CAN TRAVEL THE WORLD and go nowhere. One can be stuck keeping the faith at home and discover a new world. In this story most of the action takes place within a hundred-foot radius around our house. But that circle contains histories. This was a year in which we stayed closer but saw farther. We came to see the many ways in which our daily existence is strange and romantic, unpredictable and quirky, buoyed and burdened with exotic customs as any place is. Home is always too close and yet too distant for us to fully know it. It can take a kind of magic spell to let us see the miracles in our everyday routines. Our enabling wizard was the little owl.”
― Carl Safina, Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe

“healthy humility about one’s own ignorance is the beginning of curiosity”
― Carl Safina, Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe

“Molecular biology could read notes in the score, but it couldn’t hear the music.”
― Carl Safina, Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe

“We are raindrops falling into waves in the great ocean. But mainly we are energy in a package, matter of a moment, a little puff of breeze that will whirl away while everything around it continues.”
― Carl Safina, Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe