Being a Beast Quotes

“There was a blackbird in our garden whose yellow and black eye looked knowing. It maddened me. He flaunted his knowledge, and hence my ignorance. The winking of that eye was like a glimpse of a pirate’s crumpled treasure map.”
― Charles Foster, Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide

“Evolutionary biology is a numinous statement of the interconnectedness of things – a sort of scientific advaita: feel it as well as know it. Feel it to know it properly. What’s an animal? It’s a rolling conversation with the land from which it comes and of which it consists. What’s a human? It’s a rolling conversation with the land from which it comes and of which it consists – but a more stilted, stuttering conversation than that of most wild animals. The conversations can become stories and acquire the shape and taste of personality. Then they become the sort of animals we celebrate, and the sort of people we want to sit next to at dinner.”
― Charles Foster, Being a Beast

“Women have more Theory of Mind than men, which makes them nicer people – less prone to start wars or engage in egocentric monologues at the dinner table. There’s no reason to restrict Theory of Mind to an ability to put oneself into another’s shoes. It involves too an ability to put oneself into another’s hoofs, pads or fins. Broadly, it is the ability to appreciate the interconnectedness of things –”
― Charles Foster, Being a Beast

“When we walk into a wood, we share its sensory outputs (light, colour, smell, sound and so on) with all the other creatures there. But would any of them recognise our description of the wood? Every organism creates a different world in its brain. It lives in that world.”
― Charles Foster, Being a Beast