30 Quotes by Elisabeth Tova Bailey

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.

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.

As the snail’s world grew more familiar, my own human world became less so; my species was so large, so rushed, and so confusing.

Like Sleeping Beauty, a snail may not wake until circumstances are favorable – though, like Rip Van Winkle, it may wake into a changed world.

Was this truly a door that I would someday open and walk through, as if walking out into the world were an ordinary thing to do?

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.

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.

Still, my friends were golden threads randomly appearing in the monotonous fabric of my days.

The slant of sun would slowly steepen towards mid-day, then lengthen as it slowly fell away.