## Metadata - Author: [[Sabrina Imbler]] - Full Title: How Far the Light Reaches - Category: #books ## Highlights - Imagine having the power to become resilient to all that is hostile to us. Confinement, solitude, our own toxic waste. Salt, waves, hundred-pound sturgeon that could swallow us whole. Imagine the freedom of encountering space for the first time and taking it up. Imagine showing up to your high school reunion, seeing everyone who once made you feel small, only now you’re a hundred times bigger than you once were. A dumped goldfish has no model for what a different and better life might look like, but it finds it anyway. I want to know what it feels like to be unthinkable too, to invent a future that no one expected of you. ([Location 218](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09X5D2XMT&location=218)) - long periods of restraint interrupted by serendipitous sprees of indulgence. ([Location 384](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09X5D2XMT&location=384)) - According to the oceanographers who found the first whale fall, there are 690,000 skeletons of the nine largest whale species decaying on the seafloor at any given time. This is to say: when we killed 360,000 blue whales and hauled their bodies to land, we caused another, unimaginable ripple of death at the bottom of the ocean. Hagfish, octopuses, sea snails, bristle and bone worms, adults and larvae, shuttling themselves along the great expanse of the deep sea and coming up with nothing: no whales, living or dead. One whale provides as much food as a thousand years’ worth of marine snow, the white flakes of organisms that died and disintegrated nearer the surface. In the historically whaled waters of the North Atlantic, about one-third of organisms that specialize on whale falls may have already gone extinct. ([Location 833](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09X5D2XMT&location=833))