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Emma Sloley Biography

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“It's so weird the way people started smoking again," said Sailor. "You might not know this, but everyone stopped smoking for years and years. And then, boom." "What's your theory?" Again, I knew she'd have one. We loved our theories. "My theory is people decided everything else was fucked, so it didn't even matter anymore. They might as well kill themselves in the manner of their own choosing.”

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Book:The Island of Last Things
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“Feliz is our lone jaguar. The last jaguar we had before him died of despair. That wasn't the official cause of death, of course not, but we all knew it. The rumor goes that the zoo's owners, the Pinkton family, paid an obscene amount to acquire another jaguar, probably the only one on Earth, given the state of the countries in which the creature's natural habitat once existed. Feliz was plucked out of the last few acres of the Amazon as the bulldozers waited, like customers impatiently hovering while a buffet is prepared. So Feliz is kind of a big deal. He doesn't appear cognizant of this fact, however. If anything, he looks to be on a mission to wear away the floor of his enclosure until he drops right through the earth and out of this life. He paces without cease. His nails are worn to stubs and his mouth hangs open in a perpetual rictus that wrecks your heart. He longs to forget all this, and to be forgotten.”

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Book:The Island of Last Things
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“There's also an advisory board that's very into"--I made air quotes--"'optimal productivity.' Some theory about how productivity increases when workers don't know what their work is going to be each day. Switching from one task to another helps employees adapt and become more nimble? Something like that." "Well, that's completely psychotic," Sailor said, but in an unsurprised way. "Wonder how many members of this illustrious advisory board own sweatshop empires, am I right?”

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Book:The Island of Last Things
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“I had thoroughly internalized the notion that usefulness was the only metric of whether something had value. A carabiner was useful. A multitool was useful. Schedules were useful, as were cages and bars. Tranquilizer darts were regrettable but useful. A flower could be useful but only because it might provide food or diversion for a bird or animal, not because it was beautiful. Its beauty was incidental and easily dismissed. But then Sailor arrived, and I realized that even the smallest sliver of beauty matters and can be useful. Not because it makes a difference on some cosmic level, but because it quiets our restless hearts for a moment. It whispers to us that joy is still possible.”

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Book:The Island of Last Things
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“So many of the animals are sensitive, exquisitely attuned to the emotional state of those around them. They can pick up the smallest frequencies of distress or anger, and it can make them act in ways that clueless keepers disapprovingly call "erratic." It's not erratic, though, to be influenced by the mood of someone close to you. Humans do it all the time.”

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Book:The Island of Last Things
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“It's just that the animals matter in a way that's hard to define. They matter not only because a particular species will die out if we don't lock its last members away in here, but because they belong to us, to the whole story of this Earth, and without them the story would not be as beautiful or as profound. Anyone who has ever stopped to watch a hummingbird beat its tiny wings to a stillness as it draws the nectar out of a flower with its long, curled tongue will know what I mean. The natural world is beautiful even when it is terrible, even when it is engaged in ritual slaughter. Any antelope who has ever felt the hot breath of a lion on its neck will know what I mean. In that last moment of its life, the antelope surely regrets that it will never again experience the thrum of the savannah under hoof, the generous shade of the acacia tree, the smell of water running over smooth white rocks. It wishes not to have to leave this beautiful world. The natural world and the nonhuman beings in it are part of what makes this life worth living. If we kill all the beauty around us, we kill a part of ourselves. These thoughts whirl around pointlessly in my head, never resolving, just coming back to their starting point like a snake devouring its tail.”

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Book:The Island of Last Things
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“Much as I'd always enjoyed the balm of the plants and flowers, it had never occurred to me to aspire to work in here. I suppose I've been so single-mindedly committed to the animals, with their flesh-and-blood needs and their inescapable demands, that these other gentler living things have been obscured to me. I regret that now. There was always so much more than I have allowed myself to see.”

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