Nature & Animals Quote by Julian May

May’s line cuts like a field note from a future anthropology: some people mend you, and some people move you. The phrasing is deliberately plainspoken, but it smuggles in a sly taxonomy of charisma. “Healers” suggests service, care, even a quasi-sacred vocation. “Animal magnetism,” by contrast, is older, gaudier language - part Victorian parlor science, part erotic weather report. It doesn’t claim virtue. It claims force.

That contrast is the engine of the quote’s intent. May is separating two kinds of power that often get confused in real life and in genre fiction: the power to restore and the power to attract. The subtext is a warning against misrecognition. We’re prone to treat the person who can command a room as if they’re also the person who can steady a life, and to assume intensity equals insight. May implies those gifts don’t just differ; they can compete. Magnetism can mimic healing by making us feel seen, chosen, electrified. Healing is quieter: it changes your baseline, not your pulse.

As a science-fiction writer fascinated by altered humans, psychic talent, and social evolution, May is also gesturing at a world where “special” is a spectrum with consequences. Labeling these types isn’t neutral; it’s governance. Who gets trusted? Who gets followed? Who gets excused? In one compact sentence, May sketches a social drama: caretakers and catalysts, nurses and sirens, the indispensable and the irresistible - and the cultural habit of rewarding the latter.