Sy Montgomery Quotes

#1. Octopus can fish for prey while deciding what color and pattern to turn, what shape to make their bodies, be on alert for predators and aware how far away their dens are.

Sy Montgomery

#2. Experiments at Seattle aquarium prove that octopuses can tell individual humans apart - even when the people are dressed identically - just by looking up at them through the water.

Sy Montgomery

#3. The word compassion means "with suffering." To have compassion is to willingly join in suffering - to show those you love that you will not let them suffer

Sy Montgomery

#4. Assessing the mind of a creature this alien demands that we be extraordinary flexible in our own thinking. Marine biologist James Wood suggests our hubris gets in our way.

Sy Montgomery

#5. I had nixed the idea of having children when I was myself a child, having learned in the 1960s that human overpopulation was literally crowding other species off the planet. Why create another mouth to gnaw at the overburdened earth?

Sy Montgomery

#6. Just about every animal," Scott says - not just mammals and birds - "can learn, recognize individuals, and respond to empathy.

Sy Montgomery

#7. I have thought for a long time that one day, if I finally got to deserve it, I would love to write about the minds of invertebrates.

Sy Montgomery

#8. They don't want to hear how Octavia is different from us. They want to know how we're the same. They know what it's like to have an itch. They can imagine what it's like to be a mother. This brief encounter has changed them. Now they can identify with an octopus. They

Sy Montgomery

#9. As with a child, to commune with Athena demands a level of openness and intuition greater than that used in the usual discourse between adult humans of a common culture.

Sy Montgomery

#10. I wonder: Can a brainless animal feel curiosity? Does it want to play? Or does it only "want" toys or food the way a plant "wants" the sun? Does a sea star experience consciousness? If it does, what does consciousness feel like to a sea star? Clearly, I have entered a world I cannot

Sy Montgomery

#11. When I would visit my octopus friend, Octavia, at New England aquarium, usually she would look me in the face, flow right over to see me, and flush red with emotion when she took my arms in hers. Often when I'd stroke her she'd turn white beneath my touch, the colour of a relaxed octopus.

Sy Montgomery

#12. But Christopher obeyed a higher calling: the intoxicating call of green grass and sunshine, the sweet scent of the earth on one of the last days of summer.

Sy Montgomery

#13. The fact that three-fifths of an octopus' neurons are not in their brain, but in their arms, suggests that each arm has a mind of its own.

Sy Montgomery

#14. Always somewhere there is fire or smoke, insistent reminders of the greed consuming the world

Sy Montgomery

#15. If you took the monsters' point of view, everything they did made perfect sense. The trick was learning to think like a monster.

Sy Montgomery

#16. Normally a prolonged stare from a gorilla is a threat. But Digit's gaze bore no aggression. He seemed to say: I know. Dian would later write that she believed Digit understood she was sick.

Sy Montgomery

#17. To get to know someone so different from myself as an octopus, and to know that the individual recognised me and even enjoyed my company, was an enormous privilege. The octopuses I came to know were strong but gentle, and the suction of their suckers tasting my skin pulled me like an alien's kiss.

Sy Montgomery

#18. Watching a pig eat is the ultimate vicarious thrill. Seldom can you take such pleasure in another's joy. Here is someone following his bliss. Pigs are quite literally made for eating - they were bred to eat and get fat fast.

Sy Montgomery

#19. Volumes of history written in the ancient alphabet of G and C, A and T.

Sy Montgomery

#20. So, if an octopus is this smart," Steve asked Bill, "what other animals are out there that could be this smart--that we don't think of as being sentient and having personality and memories and all these things?

Sy Montgomery

#21. Adult gorillas will fight to the death defending their families. This is why poachers who may be seeking only one infant for the zoo trade must often kill all the adults in the family to capture the baby.

Sy Montgomery

#22. We split from our common ancestor with the octopus half a billion years ago. And yet, you can make friends with an octopus.

Sy Montgomery

#23. I think all animals have souls. I feel certain that if we have souls, octopuses have souls, too. If you grant something a soul, it demands a certain level of sacredness. Look around us. The world is holy. It is full of souls.

Sy Montgomery

#24. I have always loved octopuses. No sci-fi alien is so startlingly strange.

Sy Montgomery

#25. In all religions, as in all legal systems. people find ways to skirt the rules. We obey the letter of the law without honoring its spirit, and then reassure ourselves of our righteousness.

Sy Montgomery