"Nothing to be done really about animals. Anything you do looks foolish. The answer isn't in us. It's almost as if we're put here on earth to show how silly they aren't"
About this Quote
Hoban’s line has the weary snap of someone who’s tried, repeatedly, to square human self-importance with the blunt fact of animal life and failed. “Nothing to be done really” isn’t resignation so much as an admission that our usual tools - explanation, management, sentimental rescue narratives - misfire the moment we point them at creatures that aren’t auditioning for our moral drama. The sentence “Anything you do looks foolish” is a small humiliation: even kindness can curdle into theater, and control is just another name for panic. Hoban’s wit comes from treating human agency as the problem, not the solution.
“The answer isn’t in us” undercuts the default modern impulse to turn every relationship into a mirror. We want animals to confirm we’re good, enlightened, caretakers. Hoban suggests the opposite: animals expose the limits of the human story we keep telling about ourselves. They don’t need our language, our justifications, our ideologies. Their “silliness” is ours - the busy, performative kind, the kind that keeps insisting consciousness must be central because it’s ours.
Then he lands the real sting: “It’s almost as if we’re put here on earth to show how silly they aren’t.” That inversion is classic Hoban: wry, gently cosmic, but pointed. Animals become a corrective, a baseline of unselfconscious being. Against them, humans look like the species that can’t stop narrating, can’t stop fixing, can’t stop mistaking attention for understanding. The quote doesn’t romanticize animals as pure; it frames them as indifferent to our need to be the smartest thing in the room. That’s why it works: it’s less an animal aphorism than a critique of the human compulsion to make everything, even empathy, about ourselves.
“The answer isn’t in us” undercuts the default modern impulse to turn every relationship into a mirror. We want animals to confirm we’re good, enlightened, caretakers. Hoban suggests the opposite: animals expose the limits of the human story we keep telling about ourselves. They don’t need our language, our justifications, our ideologies. Their “silliness” is ours - the busy, performative kind, the kind that keeps insisting consciousness must be central because it’s ours.
Then he lands the real sting: “It’s almost as if we’re put here on earth to show how silly they aren’t.” That inversion is classic Hoban: wry, gently cosmic, but pointed. Animals become a corrective, a baseline of unselfconscious being. Against them, humans look like the species that can’t stop narrating, can’t stop fixing, can’t stop mistaking attention for understanding. The quote doesn’t romanticize animals as pure; it frames them as indifferent to our need to be the smartest thing in the room. That’s why it works: it’s less an animal aphorism than a critique of the human compulsion to make everything, even empathy, about ourselves.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
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