Quotes about snail (44 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“The year's at the spring,
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hill-side's dew-pearl'd;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in His heaven—
All's right with the world!”

Robert Browning Pippa Passes

Part I, line 221.
Source: Pippa Passes (1841)

God , World , Spring

“My body, now close to fifty years of age, has become an old tree that bears bitter peaches, a snail which has lost its shell, a bagworm separated from its bag; it drifts with the winds and clouds that know no destination. Morning and night I have eaten traveler's fare, and have held out for alms a pilgrim's wallet.”

Bashō Matsuo (1644–1694) Japanese poet

Genjūan no Fu ("Prose Poem on the Unreal Dwelling") in Donald Keene, Anthology of Japanese Literature, p. 374 (Translation: Donald Keene)
Statements

Age , Travel , Tree , Night

“I hope the terrestrial snails, secreted away in their burrows by day across the earth's vast landscapes, will continue their mysterious lives, gliding slowly and gracefully through the night, millions of years into the future.”

Elisabeth Tova Bailey book The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating (2010), "Epilogue," page 170

Hope , Future , Secret , Night

“Uncontradicting solitude
Supports me on its giant palm;
And like a sea-anemone
Or simple snail, there cautiously
Unfolds, emerges, what I am.”

Philip Larkin (1922–1985) English poet, novelist, jazz critic and librarian

Source: Collected Poems

Support , Solitude , Sea

“It reminded me of what Dad said after every snail’s crawl home from
Albany when snow hit.“It’s New York, people. It’s winter. We get snow. If you aren’t prepared
to deal with it, move to Miami.”

Kelley Armstrong (1968) Canadian writer

Source: Dangerous

People , Home , Winter

“me giving my mom romantic advice is kind of like a goldfish giving a snail advice on how to fly.”
-Will Grayson (pg. 66)”

David Levithan (1972) American author and editor

Moms , Flying

“Even a snail will eventually reach its destination.”

Gail Tsukiyama (1957) American writer

Source: The Street of a Thousand Blossoms

“The hand that dips into the bottom of the pot will eat the biggest snail.”

Wole Soyinka (1934) Nigerian writer

“James gave the huffle of a snail in danger. And nobody heard him at all.”

A.A. Milne (1882–1956) British author

“I am this fiery snail crawling home.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Source: Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame

Home

“A man builds a house in England with the expectation of living in it and leaving it to his children; while we shed our houses in America as easily as a snail does his shell. We live a while in Boston, and then a while in New York, and then, perhaps, turn up at Cincinnati. Scarcely any body with us is living where they expect to live and die. The man that dies in the house he was born in is a wonder. There is something pleasant in the permanence and repose of the English family estate, which we, in America, know very little of.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) Abolitionist, author

Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands (1854).

Children , Family , Housing

“…his head emerged cautiously, like that of a snail taking a look around after a thunderstorm.”

P.G. Wodehouse book The Code of the Woosters

The Code of the Woosters (1938)

“An eye from another world; a smell-detector, investigating the path ahead. We don't often see a snail that way, and that's because we've only recently had the tiny lenses and electronic cameras that we need to explore this miniature world. But when we meet its inhabitants face to face, we suddenly realise that their behaviour can be just as meaningful to us as the behaviour of many animals more our own size.”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

Opening narration
Life in the Undergrowth (2005)

World , Way , Animals

“I invariably, after great familiarity with a film, concoct a personal way of reading it that relies entirely on information which a public audience would, I feel, have scant interest. I might travel from a casual unrehearsed glance of a minor character to a detail of folded cloth, from a rhyme in the dialogue to an over-excited high note in the music, from a misplaced shadow to a patch of rogue colour, from a shine on a furniture leg to a curious accidental photographic haze around a street lamp, from the examination of a cloud that looks like a snail to the discomfort of an actress who I know is stifling a sneeze.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Watching Water

Music , Way , Travel , Feeling

“You also remember well who first burned the bridges of your railroad, who forced Union men to give up their slaves to work on the rebel forts at Bowling Green, who took wagons and horses and burned houses of persons differing with them honestly in opinion, when I would not let our men burn fence rails for fire or gather fruit or vegetables though hungry, and these were the property of outspoken rebels. We at that time were restrained, tied by a deep seated reverence for law and property. The rebels first introduced terror as a part of their system, and forced contributions to diminish their wagon trains and thereby increase the mobility and efficiency of their columns. When General Buell had to move at a snail's pace with his vast wagon trains, Bragg moved rapidly, living on the country. No military mind could endure this long, and we are forced in self defense to imitate their example. To me this whole matter seems simple. We must, to live and prosper, be governed by law, and as near that which we inherited as possible. Our hitherto political and private differences were settled by debate, or vote, or decree of a court. We are still willing to return to that system, but our adversaries say no, and appeal to war. They dared us to war, and you remember how tauntingly they defied us to the contest. We have accepted the issue and it must be fought out. You might as well reason with a thunder-storm.”

William T. Sherman (1820–1891) American General, businessman, educator, and author.

1860s, 1864, Letter to James Guthrie (August 1864)

Men , War , Law , Time

“Shun delays, they breed remorse;
Take thy time while time is lent thee;
Creeping snails have weakest force,
Fly their fault lest thou repent thee.
Good is best when soonest wrought,
Linger’d labours come to nought.”

Robert Southwell (1561–1595) English Jesuit

"Loss in Delay", line 1; p. 60.

Time , Flying

“The snail's pace is the normal pace of any democracy.”

Helmut Schmidt (1918–2015) Chancellor of West Germany 1974-1982

DIE ZEIT, 19. Oktober 2003, zeit.de http://www.zeit.de/politik/Interview_031030

Democracy

“And in the end, after all that's happened these past 19 months, the Barack Obama I know today is the same man I fell in love with 19 years ago. He's the same man who drove me and our new baby daughter home from the hospital 10 years ago this summer, inching along at a snail's pace, peering anxiously at us in the rearview mirror, feeling the whole weight of her future in his hands, determined to give her everything he'd struggled so hard for himself, determined to give her what he never had: the affirming embrace of a father's love.”

Michelle Obama (1964) lawyer, writer, wife of Barack Obama and former First Lady of the United States

2000s, Democratic National Convention speech (2008)

Love , Feeling , Home , Past

“We hope the "real" person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

On “consumeristic appetite for interviews,” New York Times (17 August 1986)

Hope , Personality

“I'd rather be a sparrow than a snail
Yes I would, if I could, I surely would
I'd rather be a hammer than a nail
Yes I would, if I only could, I surely would”

Paul Simon (1941) American musician, songwriter and producer

El Condor Pasa (If I Could)
Song lyrics, Bridge over Troubled Water (1970)

“I contend that the continued racial classification of Homo sapiens represents an outmoded approach to the general problem of differentiation within a species. In other words, I reject a racial classification of humans for the same reasons that I prefer not to divide into subspecies the prodigiously variable West Indian land snails that form the subject of my own research.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Ever Since Darwin

"Why We Should Not Name Human Races—A Biological View", p. 231
Ever Since Darwin (1977)

Problem

“Winter's here, and you feel lousy: You're coughing and sneezing; your muscles ache; your nose is an active mucus volcano. These symptoms -- so familiar at this time of year -- can mean only one thing: Tiny fanged snails are eating your brain.”

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

The Miami Herald, originally 16 November 2003
Columns and articles

Feeling , Winter , Time

“I would not enter on my list of friends,
(Though graced with polish'd manners and fine sense,
Yet wanting sensibility) the man
Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm.
An inadvertent step may crush the snail
That crawls at evening in the public path;
But he that has humanity, forewarn'd,
Will tread aside, and let the reptile live.”

William Cowper The Task

Source: The Task (1785), Book VI, Winter Walk at Noon, Line 560.

Sense

“When that half-burnt log and those cinders were alight she was alive! Little has been changed here yet. I can do nothing. My life creeps like a snail.”

Thomas Hardy book The Return of the Native

Bk. V, ch. 2
The Return of the Native (1878)

Life , Change

“It's all done with gears. Also pinions, snails, arbors; pawls and ratchets; and cam followers; cables, levers, bell cranks, and pivots.”

Brian Hayes (scientist) (1900) American scientist, columnist and author

Source: Group Theory in the Bedroom (2008), Chapter 1, Clock Of Ages, p. 7

“The snail will get to Easter just as soon.”

Eustache Deschamps (1346–1406) French poet

Aussi tost vient à Pasques limaçon.
"Moult se vantoit li cerfs d'estre legiers", line 10; text and translation from Brian Woledge (ed.) The Penguin Book of French Verse, 1: To the Fifteenth Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1961] 1968) p. 238.

“…in various types of organisms, from snails to flies to mice to people. …learning and memory, as well as synaptic and neuronal plasticity, represent a family of processes that share a common logic and some key components but vary in the details of their molecular mechanisms.”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

In Search of Memory (2006)

People , Family , Learning , Memory

“Scholars, like princes, may learn something by being incognito. Yet we see those who cannot go into a bookseller's shop, or bear to be five minutes in a stage-coach, without letting you know who they are. They carry their reputation about with them as the snail does its shell, and sit under its canopy, like the lady in the lobster. I cannot understand this at all. What is the use of a man's always revolving round his own little circle? He must, one should think, be tired of it himself, as well as tire other people.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"On People With One Idea"
Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/TableHazIV.htm (1821-1822)

People , Understanding , Thinking , Learning

“It is so hard for an evolutionary biologist to write about extinction caused by human stupidity. […] Let me then float an unconventional plea, the inverse of the usual argument. […] The extinction of Partula is unfair to Partula. That is the conventional argument, and I do not challenge its primacy. But we need a humanistic ecology as well, both for the practical reason that people will always touch people more than snails do or can, and for the moral reason that humans are legitimately the measure of all ethical questions—for these are our issues, not nature's.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Eight Little Piggies

"Unenchanted Evening", p. 39
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

People , Stupidity , Question , Nature

“We should bow deeply before the orchid and the snail and join our palms reverently before the monarch butterfly and the magnolia tree. The feeling of respect for all species will help us recognize the noblest nature in ourselves.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

The Sun My Heart (1996)

Feeling , Nature , Tree , Help

“There are no small number of people in this world who, solitary by nature, always try to go back into their shell like a hermit crab or a snail.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

The Man in a Case (1898)

People , World , Nature

“Houses, are but badly built boats so firmly aground that you cannot think of moving them. They are definitely inferior things, belonging to the vegetable not the animal world, rooted and stationary, incapable of gay transition. I admit, doubtfully, as exceptions, snail-shells and caravans. The desire to build a house is the tired wish of a man content thenceforward with a single anchorage. The desire to build a boat is the desire of youth, unwilling yet to accept the idea of a final resting-place.”

Arthur Ransome (1884–1967) English author and journalist

Racundra's First Cruise (Chapter 1), 1923

Youth , World , Idea , Thinking

“The snail lives the way I like to live; he carries his own home with him.”

Julio Cortázar (1914–1984) Argentinian writer

Way , Home

“Fairness is a concept that holds only in limited situations. Yet we want the concept to extend to everything, in and out of phase. From snails to hardware stores to married life. Maybe no one finds it, or even misses it, but fairness is like love. What is given has nothing to do with what we seek.”

Haruki Murakami book Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Source: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985), Chapter 39, Popcorn, Lord Jim, Extinction

Love , Life

“I'm not - the terrific guy you keep telling me about. I'm not made of sugar and spice and everything nice. I'm made of rats and snails and puppy-dogs tails. I lie sometimes. I have broken people's hearts. I'm looking for love, I'll admit that, but now that it's here in abundance, I'm afraid of commitment and I want you, please, to leave me.”

Daniel Handler book Adverbs

Adverbs (2006), Collectively

Love , People , Lie , Dogs

“The Franks had all been German at first, but some of them had taken to eating frogs and snails and were gradually turning into Frenchmen, a fact not generally known at the time because there were no French as yet.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950), Part III: Strange Bedfellows, Charlemagne

Time

“Her pretty feet, like snails, did creep
A little out, and then,
As if they playèd at bo-peep,
Did soon draw in again.”

Robert Herrick book Hesperides

"To Mistress Susanna Southwell". Compare: "Her feet beneath her petticoat / Like little mice stole in and out", Sir John Suckling, "Ballad upon a Wedding".
Hesperides (1648)

Drawing

“Snail, snail, glister me forward,
Bird, soft-sigh me home,
Worm, be with me.
This is my hard time.”

Theodore Roethke (1908–1963) American poet

"The Lost Son," ll. 8-11
The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948)
Context: I shook the softening chalk of my bones,
Saying,
Snail, snail, glister me forward,
Bird, soft-sigh me home,
Worm, be with me.
This is my hard time.

Home , Bird , Time

“When I was a child, I was terrified by this. (plays theme from The Magic Roundabout) It was very sinister, wasn't it? It just went on and on, like Dante's seventh circle of Hell. I recently found out there was a secret middle section deemed unsuitable for small children. There's about four hours of this, then it all starts to go a bit weird.
(plays discordant music)
(Booming echoing voice) I am Zebedee, lord of the woods! Bow down snail, I have dominion!
Ch. 38, 1:24:37”

Bill Bailey (1965) English comedian, musician, actor, TV and radio presenter and author

Bewilderness (DVD, 2001)

Children , Secret , Music , Hell

“It is unlikely that the good of a snail should reside in its shell: so is it likely that the good of a man should?”

Epictetus (50–138) philosopher from Ancient Greece

Book I, ch. 20.
Discourses

“If the action of The Bridge Party moves at what might at times seems to be a snail’s pace, it is because I want the audience to experience the characters as full human beings, not as abstractions or stereotypes…”

Sandra Seaton Playwright and writer

On choosing her pacing (as quoted in the book Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women https://books.google.com/books?id=G1il9uQG3A8C&pg=PA319&lpg=PA319&dq; 1998)

Time

“Unless we can trace our lineage to the original humans and find that we live where they lived, we are all international migrants. Furthermore, we are all wanderers. We symbolically carry our homes on our backs, like turtles, snails, and crustaceans—for the meanings and associations of home are always with us and affect our orientation in space and time, and how we negotiate our way through the world.”

Michael Allen Fox (1940)

Home: A Very Short Introduction https://books.google.it/books?id=CyShDQAAQBAJ&pg=PT0 (Oxford University Press, 2017), ch. 7.

World , Home , Way , Time

“Ask the world to reveal its quietude —
not the silence of machines when they are still,
but the true quiet by which birdsongs,
trees, bellworts, snails, clouds, storms
become what they are, and are nothing else.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Given (2005), Sabbaths 2001

World , Silence , Tree

“Sensing the approaching danger, the snail flees. But in a world of snail paces, the conch is something of a Ferrari. It calls for desperate measures. Exhausted by the effort of its last-ditch attempt, the tulip snail is slowly... gunned... down.”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

"Tidal Seas"
Blue Planet (2001)

Sense , World , Effort