The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating Quotes

“Illness isolates; the isolated become invisible; the invisible become forgotten. But the snail....the snail kept my spirit from evaporating.”
― Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

“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.”
― Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

“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.”
― Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

“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.”
― Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

“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”
― Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

“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.”
― Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

“Those of us with illnesses are the holders of the silent fears of those with good health.”
― Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

“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.”
― Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

“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.”
― Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

“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.”
― Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

“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.”
― Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

“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.”
― Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

“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.”
― Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

“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.”
― Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

“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)”
― Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

“One has to respect the preferences of another creature, no matter its size, and I did so gladly.”
― Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

“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.”
― Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

“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.”
― Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

“Humanity is exalted not because we are so far above other living creatures, but because knowing them well elevates the very concept of life. —EDWARD O. WILSON, Biophilia, 1984”
― Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

“While illness keeps me always aware of my mortality, I realize that what matters most is not that I survive, nor even that my species survives, but that life itself continues to evolve. As the Holocene mass extinction rushes on, which species will be left? And what new creatures will evolve that we cannot now imagine - for what creature could ever have imagined us?”
― Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

“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”
― Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

“The snail had been a true mentor; its tiny existence had sustained me. Late one winter night I wrote in my journal:
A last look at the stars and then to sleep. Lots to do at whatever pace I can go. I must remember the snail. Always remember the snail.”
― Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

“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.”
― Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

“I wrote to one of my doctors:
I could never have guessed what would get me through this past year - a woodland snail and its offspring; I honestly don't think I would have made it otherwise. Watching another creature go about its life...somehow gave me, the watcher, purpose too. If life mattered to the snail and the snail mattered to me, it meant something in my life mattered, so I kept on...”
― Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

“How wonderful it would be if we humans with illnesses could simply go dormant while the scientific world went about its snail-paced research, and wake only when new, safe medical treatments were available.”
― Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

“I eagerly awaited visitors, but the anticipation and the extra energy of greetings caused a numbing exhaustion. As the first stories unfolded, my spirit held on to the conversation as best it could—I so wanted these connections to the outside world—but my body sank beneath waves of weakness. Still, my friends were golden threads randomly appearing in the monotonous fabric of my days. Each visit was a window that opened momentarily into the life I had once known, always falling shut before I could make my way back through. The visits were like dreams from which I awoke once more alone.”
― Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

“Given the ease with which health infuses life with meaning and purpose, it is shocking how swiftly illness steals away those certainties.”
― Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

“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.”
― Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

“There is a certain depth of illness that is piercing in it's 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.”
― Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

“With its mysterious, fluid movement, the snail was the quintessential tai chi master.”
― Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating