The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating
Elisabeth Tova Bailey
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Illness isolates; the isolated become invisible; the invisible become forgotten. But the snail....the snail kept my spirit from evaporating.”
“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.”
“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 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 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”
“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.”
“Those of us with illnesses are the holders of the silent fears of those with good health.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
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Book Keywords:
snails, tooth, inspirational, meaning, time, wasting-time, natural-history, overcoming-adversity, disease, illness, nature, wisdom, non-fiction, life, weakness, life-changing, health, memoirs, dentistry, nature-quotes, spiritual-development, dentist
