Most animals are pragmatic about mysteries: If they run across something they don't understand, all they care about is whether it's edible and whether it's dangerous. Humans, on the other hand, are drawn to the mystery for its own sake.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the fundamental differences in how animals and humans perceive and engage with the unknown.
Tana French's quote suggests that while most animals approach situations through a lens of practicality, assessing whether new experiences are safe or beneficial, humans possess an intrinsic curiosity that drives them to explore mysteries regardless of the risks or rewards. This reflects not only our intelligence but also our emotional and intellectual complexity, as we seek understanding and meaning beyond mere survival.
In practice
Citing this quote in a discussion about the importance of curiosity in human nature.
I used to think I sewed us together at the edges with my own hands, pulled the stitches tight and I could unpick them any time I wanted. Now I think it always ran deeper than that and farther, underground; out of sight and way beyond my control.
Over time, the ghosts of things that happened start to turn distant; once they've cut you a couple of million times, their edges blunt on your scar tissue, they wear thin. The ones that slice like razors forever are the ghosts of things that never got the chance to happen.
Don't get discouraged if you're hammering away at a sentence or a paragraph or a chapter, and it keeps coming out wrong. You're allowed to get it wrong, as many times as you need to; you only need to get it right once.
I wanted to tell her that being loved is a talent too, that it takes as much guts and as much work as loving; that some people, for whatever reason, never learn the knack
If you're writing a scene for a character with whom you disagree in every way, you still need to show how that character is absolutely justified in his or her own mind, or the scene will come across as being about the author's views rather than about the character's.
I had been right: freedom smelled like ozone and thunderstorms and gunpowder all at once, like snow and bonfires and cut grass, it tasted like seawater and oranges.
We live in a society of an imposed forgetfulness, a society that depends on public amnesia.
Full circle. A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever. I am legend.
I'm for democracy, but imposing democracy is an oxymoron. People have to choose democracy, and it has to come up from below.
It is while you are patiently toiling at the little tasks of life that the meaning and shape of the great whole of life dawn on you.
There are things of which I may not speak; There are dreams that cannot die; There are thoughts that make the strong heart weak, And bring a pallor into the cheek, And a mist before the eye.
Majorities, as such, afford no guarantees for justice. They are men of the same nature as minorities. They have the same passions for fame, power, and money, as minorities; and are liable and likely to be equally - perhaps more than equally, because more boldly - rapacious, tyrannical and unprincipled, if intrusted with power.
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