Fox & I Quotes

“A double rainbow had changed the course of my relationship with the fox. I had been jogging when I realised that he would live only a few years in this harsh country. At the time I believed that making an emotional investment in a short-lived creature was a fool's game. Before the jog ended, a rainbow appeared in front of me. One end of the rainbow slipped through an island of tall dead poplars drowning in gray sky, their crowns splitting and spraying into each other. I stopped. A second rainbow arched over the poplars. How many rainbows had I seen in this one valley? A hundred easy, and I always paused to watch. I realised that a fox, like a rainbow and every other gift from Nature, had an intrinsic value that was quite independent of its longevity. After that, whenever I questioned devoting so much time to an animal whose lifespan barely exceeded the blink of an eye, I remembered rainbows.”
― Catherine Raven, Fox and I: An Uncommon Friendship

“Saint-Exupéry said that explaining things to people who were never going to understand was exhausting. So he just ignored people.”
― Catherine Raven, Fox and I

“I am so much less concerned with being "normal" than with simply being alive.”
― Catherine Raven, Fox and I: An Uncommon Friendship

“I saw myself alone in the furthest future I could imagine.”
― Catherine Raven, Fox & I

“The habits and habitats of modern life are simply not evolutionarily stable. Metal and plastic. Electric lights blotting out stars. Ten-story buildings blocking sun and moon. Cars honking and everything else ringing, beeping, and buzzing until we can't even hear aspen leaves quaking. Think about all the changes that our species has experienced in the last several thousand years. Too many. Too fast.”
― Catherine Raven, Fox and I: An Uncommon Friendship

“Deer were grass eaters, a characteristic that freed them from the responsibility of overanalyzing their surroundings.”
― Catherine Raven, Fox and I

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." - John Muir”
― catherine raven, Fox & I

“Arrogance dissolves empathy.”
― Catherine Raven, Fox & I

“Despite their reputation as provocateurs to insanity and backdrops for witches on sticks, full moons are simply a rare opportunity for a unique kind of hike. Fox and I were not insomniacs; nothing had chased us into the night, and we weren’t using darkness to hide from people. After all, we lived where there weren’t any people. Or almost none. I just enjoyed the beauty, mystery, and adrenaline rush of hiking under moonlight. You would agree, if you lived in an isolated area and witnessed the full moon the way Fox and I did, as if Benjamin Franklin had not flown his electrifying kite. As if the last century had not turned.”
― Catherine Raven, Fox & I

“People were anxious in graduate school, and not just students. The habits and habitat of modern life are simply not evolutionarily stable. Metal and plastic. Electric lights blotting out stars. Ten-story buildings blocking sun and moon. Cars honking and everything else ringing, beeping, and buzzing until we can’t even hear aspen leaves quaking. Think about all the changes that our species has experienced in the last several thousand years. Too many. Too fast.

A person would be crazy if she weren’t anxious. Maybe I was the only one in that university town with blood-dampened hair, but I was not the only one with anxiety caused by modern habits and habitats that were not evolutionarily stable. Take an auditorium filled with university professors and doctoral students and pull them outside in groups: the ones addicted to food, tobacco, diet pills, alcohol, marijuana, sex, hard stuff, antidepressants, antipsychotics; the ones who couldn’t stop pulling their hair, or picking their face, or cutting their arms. The perpetual psychiatrist appointments, the suicide attempts, the television binges. Maybe I wasn’t any better than they were, but I wasn’t any worse.”
― Catherine Raven, Fox & I

“Each cow was searching for her perfect partner, and despite years of research, no scientist has ever been able to discover the criteria that females use when choosing mates. Maybe it’s because each cow chose, for herself alone, the one bull that would most displease her mother.”
― Catherine Raven, Fox and I

“Unashamedly, I was attracted to all animals that tolerated me.”
― Catherine Raven, Fox and I

“In other words, foxes could identify the differences between zzz, mmm, shhh, and so on. If Belyaev was correct, Fox heard words but did not understand them. Like me at the opera.”
― Catherine Raven, Fox and I

“I realized that a fox, like a rainbow and every other gift from Nature, had an intrinsic value that was quite independent of its longevity.”
― Catherine Raven, Fox and I

“I like to keep my thoughts so fluid that the real world and the imagined world swirls together until it is just as easy to separate them as it is to combine them.”
― Catherine Raven, Fox & I

“Non-loggers—backpackers mostly—favored listing the owl and protecting the wilderness it lived in. They felt that loggers were encroaching on the”
― Catherine Raven, Fox and I