Survival often depends on a specific focus: a relationship, a belief, or a hope balanced on the edge of possibility.Elisabeth Tova Bailey
To be understood, as to understand, we depend upon translation...Elisabeth Tova Bailey
A sound does not view itself as thought, as ought, as needing another sound for its elucidation, as etc.; it has not time for any consideration – it is occupied with the performance of its characteristics: before it has died away it must have made perfectly exact its frequency, its loudness, its length, its overtone structure, the precise morphology of these things.Elisabeth Tova Bailey
In a physical crisis, urgent questions arise. Cooperating with healing leads you along an unexpected path. I wasn't prepared for getting to know the life of a wild snail.Elisabeth Tova Bailey
I observed without thinking, looking into the terrarium simply to feel the pleasure of looking. The tiny, intimate drama on the woodland floor fascinated me.Elisabeth Tova Bailey
Most of us would say no to time travel, but we would readily accept a time warp: a skipping ahead, a rushing through, even a crude editing. Change takes its sweet timeElisabeth Tova Bailey
In nature, function alone supersedes form... Uniformity is not nature's way; diversity is nature's way.Elisabeth Tova Bailey
My own world of the human body made no sense; science could describe the minutiae of the cellular exchange, but science couldn't understand my own unhinging sadnessElisabeth Tova Bailey
The philosopher Kant, in trying to expose the roots of knowledge, concluded that nature is entirely a construct of the human mind, based on individual experience. In watching the snail, my experience became our experience, and it was surprising to find that her life, most of which was spent in a glass terrarium, was so gripping.Elisabeth Tova Bailey
The simplicity of nature is not to be measured by that of our conceptions. Infinitely varied in its effects, nature is simple only in its causes, and its economy consists in producing a great number of phenomena, often very complicated, by means of a small number of general laws.Elisabeth Tova Bailey
I will admit that I appreciated the snail's undemanding companionship.Elisabeth Tova Bailey
Life, I believe, is always a dialogue with the world and with oneself about the world.Elisabeth Tova Bailey