Nature & Animals Quote by Emma Bull

Bull’s line skewers a particular kind of intellectual laziness: the urge to treat a messy world like a storage closet that just needs better labels. “They don’t know how the world is shaped” isn’t just ignorance; it’s discomfort with ambiguity. The pivot is cruelly accurate: rather than sit with uncertainty, “they give it a shape” - a human-made template - and then commit the quiet violence of forcing reality to comply.

The real bite is in the examples. Right/left, man/woman, plant/animal, sun/moon: these feel like commonsense binaries, but Bull stacks them to show how quickly “commonsense” becomes ideology. Some pairs are political, some biological, some cosmic. That range matters. It suggests the same sorting impulse runs from how we vote to how we gender bodies to how we categorize nature, as if everything must be split into opposing camps to be legible. The line “They only want to count to two” turns taxonomy into a moral critique: binary thinking isn’t neutral; it’s a preference for simplicity over accuracy, order over lived complexity.

As a contemporary speculative writer, Bull is also doing genre work here. Fantasy and science fiction often prize the liminal - shapeshifters, hybrids, threshold spaces - as a rebuke to rigid categories. The subtext: when you insist the world comes in pairs, you don’t just misdescribe it. You make it smaller, and you make certain people and possibilities disappear.