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The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating QUOTES

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating QUOTES

1 " Given the ease with which health infuses life with meaning and purpose, it is shocking how swiftly illness steals away those certainties…Time unused and only endured still vanishes, as if time itself is starving, and each day is swallowed whole, leaving no crumbs, no memory, no trace at all. "

― , The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

2 " We are all hostages of time. We each have the same number of minutes and hours to live within a day, yet to me it didn't feel equally doled out. My illness brought me such an abundance of time that time was nearly all I had. My friends had so little time that I often wished I could give them what time I could not use. It was perplexing how in losing health I had gained something so coveted but to so little purpose. "

― , The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

3 " In terms of size, mammals are an anomaly, as the vast majority of the world's existing species are snail-sized or smaller. It's almost as if, regardless of your kingdom, the smaller your size & the earlier your place on the tree of life, the more critical is your niche on Earth: snails & worms create soil, & blue-green algae create oxygen; mammals seem comparatively dispensable, the result of the random path of evolution over a luxurious amount of time. "

― , The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

4 " The sentence that best expresses a snail's way of life: 'The right thing to do is to do nothing, the place to do it is in a place of concealment and the time to do it is as often as possible. "

― , The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

5 " It seemed far more reasonable to belong to a species that had evolved natural tooth replacement than to belong to one that had developed the dental profession. "

― , The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

6 " Survival often depends on a specific focus: A relationship, a belief, or a hope balanced on the edge of possibility. Or something more ephemeral: the way the sun passes through the hard seemingly impenetrable glass of a window and warms the blanket, or how the wind, invisible but for its wake, is so loud one can hear it through the insulated walls of a house. "

― , The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

7 " Illness isolates; the isolated become invisible; the invisible become forgotten. But the snail....the snail kept my spirit from evaporating. "

― , The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

8 " The life of a snail is as full of tasty food, comfortable beds of sorts, and a mix of pleasant and not-so-pleasant adventures as that of anyone I know "

― , The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

9 " Those of us with illnesses are the holders of the silent fears of those with good health. "

― , The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

10 " My bed was an island within the desolate sea of my room. Yet I knew that there were other people home-bound from illness or injury, scattered here and there throughout rural towns and cities around the world. And as I lay there, I felt a connection to all of them. We, too, were a colony of hermits. "

― , The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

11 " There is a certain depth of illness that is piercing in its isolation: the only rule of existence is uncertainty, and the only movement is the passage of time. One cannot bear to live through another loss of function, and sometimes friends and family cannot bear to watch. An unspoken, unbridgeable divide may widen. Even if you are still who you were, you cannot actually fully be who you are. "

― , The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

12 " Think not of the amount to be accomplished, the difficulties to be overcome, or the end to be attained, but set earnestly at the little task at your elbow, letting that be sufficient for the day. —SIR WILLIAM OSLER, physician (1849–1919) "

― , The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

13 " If a snail’s shell gets injured, a repair can be made quickly. New shell material is secreted by the mantle, and where there was once a crack, a scar appears, looking much like a skin scar. Even a missing shell section can be replaced. Oliver Goldsmith described this in 1774: Sometimes these animals are crushed seemingly to pieces, and, to all appearance, utterly destroyed; yet still they set themselves to work, and, in a few days, mend all their numerous breaches . . . to the re-establishment of the ruined habitation. But all the junctures are very easily seen, for they have a fresher colour than the rest; and the whole shell, in some measure, resembles an old coat patched with new pieces. "

― , The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

14 " WHEN THE BODY is rendered useless, the mind still runs like a bloodhound along well-worn trails of neurons, tracking the echoing questions: the confused family of whys, whats, and whens and their impossibly distant kin how. The search is exhaustive; the answers, elusive. "

― , The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

15 " EACH MORNING THERE WAS a moment, before I had fully awakened, when my mind still groped its clumsy way back to consciousness, my body not yet remembered, reality not yet acknowledged. That moment was always full of pure, sweet, uncontrollable hope. I did not ask for this hope to come; I did not even want it, for it trailed disappointment in its wake. Yet there it was, hovering within me—hope that my illness had vanished with the night and my health had returned magically with daybreak. "

― , The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

16 " They would worry about wearing me out, but I could also see that I was a reminder of all they feared: chance, uncertainty, loss and the sharp edge of mortality. "

― , The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

17 " Think not of the amount to be accomplished, the difficulties to be overcome, or the end to be attained, but set earnestly at the little task at your elbow, letting that be sufficient for the day. —SIR WILLIAM OSLER, physician "

― , The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

18 " The crucial first step to survival in all organisms is habitat selection. If you get to the right place, everything else is likely to be easier. "

― , The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

19 " One has to respect the preferences of another creature, no matter its size, and I did so gladly. "

― , The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

20 " The right thing to do is to do nothing, the place to do it is in a place of concealment and the time to do it is as often as possible. "

― , The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating