3
" Beyond this point on the river Cambridge became a kind of miniature Venice, its river water lapping up against the ancient stone of college walls, here mottled and reddened brick, there white stone. Stained, lichened, softened by water light. Here the river became a great north-south tunnel, a gothic castle from the river, flanked by locked iron gates, steps leading nowhere, labyrinths, trapdoors, landing stages where barges had unloaded their freight: crates of fine wines, flour, oats, candles, fine meats carried into the damp darkness of college cellars. "
― Rebecca Stott , Ghostwalk
4
" Paris is an ocean," a lawyer called Honoré said to me in a bar on the place Vendôme later that night. We were very drunk. "You can take as many soundings as you like, but you'll never reach the bottom of it. You can survey it, draw it, describe it. But, however thorough you are, however careful and scrupulous, something is always just beyond your reach. There will always be another unmapped cave, monsters, pearls, things undreamt of, overlooked by everyone else. "
― Rebecca Stott
10
" The oyster’s radar and defensive mechanisms are critical for its survival, for mouths other than human mouths hunger for oyster flesh. Oysters have several principal predators: the starfish wraps its arms around the oyster, forces its shell apart and ingests it; the boring sponge bores tiny holes in its shell, honeycombing it with tunnels; the slipper-limpet and the mussel smother the oysters or starve them by attaching themselves to an oyster’s shell and eating all their food; the dog-whelk and the whelk-tingle also bore into the shell and suck out the flesh.
The oyster, beset by such enemies, writes M.F.K. Fisher, ‘lives motionless, soundless, her own cold ugly shape her only dissipation, and if she escapes the menace of duck-slipper-mussel Black-Drum-leech-sponge-borer-starfish, it is for man to eat because of man’s own hunger’. "
― Rebecca Stott , Oyster
12
" Many people assume that leaving a cult like the Brethren must be exhilarating. ‘You had no TV or pop music or cinema,’ they say, ‘and then you did? It must have been amazing!’ But when you see interviews with people who have recently left cults, they describe feeling bewildered and frightened; their eyes dart around, searching for points of reference, metaphors that would get somewhere close to describing the feeling of being lost, not-at-home, without walls. "
― Rebecca Stott , In the Days of Rain: A Daughter, a Father, a Cult
15
" In a poem by William Cowper (1731–1800), ‘The Poet, The
Oyster and the Sensitive Plant’, the poet uses the oyster to
philosophize on sensitivity and suffering in the animal and
vegetable worlds.
The poem opens with the oyster bemoaning
its fate:
Ah hapless wretch! Condemned to dwell
For ever in my native shell,
Ordain’d to move when others please,
Not for my own content or ease,
But toss’d and buffeted about,
Now in the water, and now out.
‘Twere better to be born a stone
Of ruder shape and feeling none,
Than with a tenderness like mine,
And sensibilities so fine! "
― Rebecca Stott , Oyster
