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Katherine Rundell

Katherine Rundell Biography

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“And finally, avoid the temptation to strike a pose and say "It's too late." It's not true. It's half-baked nihilism: and like all half-baked nihilism, it lazily temps us to think that what we do doesn't matter now. It does matter; it will always matter. The time to give up is never. Hope - active, purposeful, informed hope - is what we owe the world. A body of unimaginable splendor turns on its axis, calling us to its aid.”

HopeTemptationToo LateNihilismSave The WorldIt Matters
Book:Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures
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“The old errors are fantastical and fantastic, and revealing of human hopes and anxieties; our terrors, our desires for greater digestive health and sexual prowess, our quest for magical solutions to relentlessly human problems. And every scientist you meet will tell you: there is no reason to believe that we haven't got just as much wrong today as we have done in every generation up till now. It would be worth our holding that knowledge, tight and urgent, as we go; our learning, though vast, is an infinitesimally small fraction of what exists.”

KnowledgeMagicErrorsHopesHuman ProblemsWrong IdeasAnxietiesWrong Conclusions
Book:Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures
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“We live in a world of such marvels. We should wake up in the morning and as we put on our trousers, we should remember the seahorse, and we should scream with awe and not stop screaming until we fall asleep, and the same the next day, and the next. Each single seahorse contains enough wonder to knock the whole of humanity off its feet, if we would but pay attention.”

WonderPay AttentionAweMarvelsSeahorse
Book:Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures
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“Amid all the Internet point-scoring, though, one thing is certain: spiders have no interest in your open mouth, which is moist and quivering and unwelcoming, and will not willingly go near it. There is just an inch of truth to it: you will have inhaled millions of microscopic pieces of spider in dust - but then, by that reckoning, you have inhaled substantial portions of people, too.”

TruthEatingMythDustSpidersInhaled
Book:Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures
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