"I have to do some work to disrupt the violent colonizing languages of almost all the texts in which I have accessed information about marine mammals and their lives, and families and super-powers and struggles."
"There are at least three ways to love you: as you were, as you are, as you will be. I love you. That means I choose all three."
"I wonder what it means for an ocean dolphin to swim up a river. The bottlenose has a range across the whole planet, the whole open ocean and yet sometimes they will choose the boundaries and specificity of a river, brackish water, narrow shores. Why?"
"And for all of you, ocean dolphins, wondering 'What am I doing in this river full of mud?' Remember why Harriet Tubman went south. She didn't have to. She was skilled, untraceable. She could have been individually free. Unencumbered. But if she wanted to tell an everlasting truth about freedom that would ring across the planet, a message for the ages, she had to live free in unfree spaces. It was the only way to bring us all with her."
"Legally and narratively, our society encourages small, isolated family units and an anti-social state reluctant to care. So care becomes the unsustainable work, the massive unpaid labor that breaks backs, hearts, and the visionary will of multitudes on a regular basis... What can we learn about the failure of the imagined ideal household? What could we learn if we cared to learn?"
"I do know that sometimes people have seen a part of themselves in me too messy to beat. Do I cherish my wildness more than I fear their rejection? Sometimes if I feel all my emotions in public I can't make myself speak. But sometimes I speak anyway."
"Sometimes when someone is avoiding you, they are just avoiding you. We have the right to be obscure. It is not an invitation to colonize us. It is not seduction. Boundaries can be so beautiful. Teach so much."
"The fact that you grew up not knowing that narwhals were a real animal swimming around in the Arctic right now, is not a coincidence. It is the result of a long and lucrative conspiracy. Turns out, since the Middle Ages, whalers, traders, explorers, and even chemists collaborated to hide the existence of the narwhal as a real animal, while selling their tusks as 'unicorn horns' at a huge profit."
"At just the right moment, the scholar Tavia Nyong'o reminded me that to conspire means to breathe together. Like narwhals do by the hundreds every summer. It's happening now. May we activate and renew the oldest conspiracy, remember all the thick impossible breathing before us and after us and with us, too real to be for sale. Too beautiful to be forgotten. Too magical for theft."
"I'm sure neither Moana nor the WWF are perfect, and no, I don't believe that capitalism can heal the Earth, but there is something for me to learn from this rare collaboration across these particular sectors."
"I love the way you live a layered Blackness where Black meets Black across itself as Black. How you make family out of need and tradition out of what is left and found."
"Sometimes when you love the coast enough you become shoreline. Move so steady on the floor algae grows on you. Sometimes the way you love is perfectly on time and very slow is fast enough. So keep on breathing."
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