The Last Animal Quotes

“I'm supposed to tell you that it's all okay. My entire job is to tell you that it's all okay, but it's not. I am expected to wear a dress with a low neckline and I am dismissed for wearing a dress with a low neckline. I hate that I like the way the dress looks. I hate that Dad is not here to appreciate me in it. I hate that I have dragged you here to see me humiliated. Again. I hate that the house is a mess and will be when we get home. I hate that my job as a woman is to disappear any evidence of our lives, of the passing of time and be pretty and tidy all the time. Twice as capable and half as appreciated.”
― Ramona Ausubel, The Last Animal

“A woman, achieving alongside her family, not in spite of it.”
― Ramona Ausubel, The Last Animal

“They had done the hard, immediate work of shock and grief so deep they drowned and the awful, unfair work of insurance paperwork and canceling mail and credit cards and magazine subscriptions. Then they had done the work of grief as tide, receding until the ground seemed almost dry, then rushing back in, foamy and cold. Now they were in the forever part, the endless low-level blue that had become a presence more than an absence. It was the ocean they swam in or the ocean that sloshed”
― Ramona Ausubel, The Last Animal

“Care less, do more,”
― Ramona Ausubel, The Last Animal

“It’s the end of Tasmanian tiger, passenger pigeon, great auk, dodo, saber-toothed cat, black rhino, Chinese river dolphin, imperial woodpecker.”
― Ramona Ausubel, The Last Animal

“village called Fior di Latte because of a river that ran out of the mountains so steep and so fast that the water was white as milk, a foamy tongue lapping the lake.”
― Ramona Ausubel, The Last Animal

“Vera tried to radiate okayness to both sister and mother, the only two people she loved in the entire world, who knew all the secret codes to break one another's hearts.”
― Ramona Ausubel, The Last Animal

“They would all be bones sooner or later but they were not themselves specimens. In the earth, unexcavated, of no scientific note. They would never be resembled in a museum. They were human bodies in a world with too many human bodies. They mattered to one another, now, alive, and that was the whole gift.”
― Ramona Ausubel, The Last Animal

“You need an imagination transplant.”
― Ramona Ausubel, The Last Animal

“We may as well funnel all that female rage into something fun.”
― Ramona Ausubel, The Last Animal

“Vera held the question in her throat for the ten millionth time: will we be all right? She had kept it there, unvoiced, for so long that it had solidified. A sharp gem she wore on the inside.”
― Ramona Ausubel, The Last Animal

“Eve and Vera played a favorite game, Fortunately/Unfortunately, a game that had travelled with them on buses, planes, ships, trains all over the globe.
"Once there were two sisters who wanted to run away," Eve started.
Vera said, "Fortunately, they had large bags fill of precious gems."
"Unfortunately," Eve continued, "the gems were heavy and the girls couldn't carry them."
"Fortunately, they came upon a cave where they could hide the bags until they had a way to transport them."
"Unfortunately, there was a wild and ferocious bear living in the cave."
Vera smiled at her older sister, "You always put a ferocious bear,"
"It's a classic."
The story was, by design endless. Meant to carry the girls across land and sea, every piece of bad news immediately followed by the upswing of salvation.”
― Ramona Ausubel, The Last Animal

“Vera did not know what she was willing to risk her life for. Science, progress, comfort, love, sleep.”
― Ramona Ausubel, The Last Animal

“Thousands of years of evolution and humans had landed here, each person in front of a blue screen trying to reduce the number in her inbox. Salutations and politeness while the earth fizzled underneath.”
― Ramona Ausubel, The Last Animal

“Every day is the strangest day yet.”
― Ramona Ausubel, The Last Animal

“also have misery and loss. What matters is what you do. Create something. Cultivate something. Grow something.”
― Ramona Ausubel, The Last Animal

“Vera was afraid that she loved steadiness and she loved Eve and her mother and that those things were not compatible.”
― Ramona Ausubel, The Last Animal

“She had been raised to imagine greatness, difficult and brave work, but she mostly wanted something steady.”
― Ramona Ausubel, The Last Animal

“We’re Californians,” Vera said, which seemed to make clear that they stood at the whatever point was opposite from purity.”
― Ramona Ausubel, The Last Animal

“She wanted a life with a shallow swing to it, a life that did not peak and decline, peak and decline.”
― Ramona Ausubel, The Last Animal

“You are loved,” Jane said again, whispered, and when Vera looked up she saw that Jane meant it for her.”
― Ramona Ausubel, The Last Animal

“Couples sat on benches and the girls walked across a bridge over a wide, shallow river. The bridge was covered in padlocks. Names were written on the locks. Hearts and arrows and the word “Love” in English. At the other end of the bridge a worker in a green zip-up jumpsuit cut locks, one by one. He knelt, brought the bolt cutter into place and squeezed. The locks that did not fall into the river were kicked in by the worker, each one sounding a different note as it fell into the water.”
― Ramona Ausubel, The Last Animal