A garland of quotations XIX
Culled from the finest speed-demons in literary history, and re-woven every Monday
A great deal was happening everywhere, and people were certainly aware of it. It was regarded as a good thing when we were the ones doing it, and aroused apprehensiveness when it was done by others. Every schoolboy could understand each thing as it happened, but as to what it all meant in general, nobody really knew except for a very few persons, and even they were not sure. Only a short time later it might as well have happened in a different sequence, or the other way around, and nobody would have known the difference, except for a few changes that inexplicably establish themselves in the course of time and so constitute the slimy track made by the snail of history.
•Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities II (1932).
The snail looks round on flower and tree,
And cries, “All these were made for me!”
•John Gay, The Shepherd’s Week (1714).
When a man contends for supremacy, he contends like the sparks flashed between two stones. How long can those sparks last? When he fights for victory, he fights in the horn of a snail. How large a world is that horn?
•Hung Tzu-ch’eng, Discourse on Vegetable Roots (ca. 1590).
Ferdinand: I am studying the art of patience.
Pescara: ’Tis a noble virtue.
Ferdinand: To drive six snails before me, from this town to Moscow; neither use goad nor whip to them, but let them take their own time…
•John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi (c. 1613).
As one knows the crooked track of a snail, I know the crooked track of a man.
•G.K. Chesterton, The Innocence of Father Brown (1911).
Neither patience nor inspiration can give wings to a snail.
•Johann Kaspar Lavater, Aphorisms on Man. Translated from the Original Manuscript of the Rev. John Caspar Lavater, Citizen of Zuric (1787).
Hearkee, Hussy, most of these fine Fellows are but mere Snails, they carry their all upon their Backs; and yet it is as difficult to keep our Wives and Daughters from the one, as our Fruit from the other.
•Henry Fielding, Love in Several Masques (1728).
Snails know that partridges and herons are their enemies; so they escape from them, and in places where these birds feed you would never see snails crawling about. But the snails which they call Areiones deceive and elude the aforesaid enemies by natural astuteness. Thus, they emerge from their native shells and feed without anxiety, while the birds which I have mentioned swoop upon the empty shells as though they were actual snails, but finding nothing, throw them aside as useless and go away. But the Areiones return and pass each to its own house, having eaten their fill of food and having preserved their lives by their deceptive migration.
•Aelian, De Natura Animalium X (C3).
Snail, Snail,
Come out of your hole,
Or Else I’ll beat you
As black as a Coal.
Snail, snail,
Put out your horns,
I’ll give you bread
And barley corns.
•Songs for the Nursery Collected From the Works of the Most Renowned Poets and Adapted to Favourite National Melodies (c. 1835).
A ploughman’s child was baking some snails. Hearing them sputtering, he said: “Stupid creatures! Your houses are on fire and yet you sing!”
•Æsop.
Snails of intellect, who see only with their Feelers.—
•S.T. Coleridge, notebook (1797–98).
Four and twenty tailors
Went to kill a snail,
The best man among them
Durst not touch her tail;
She put out her horns like a little Kyloe cow,
Run tailors run,
Or she’ll kill you all e’en now.
•Gammer Gurton’s Garland (c. 1760).
Rosalind. I had as lief be wooed of a snail.
Orlando. Of a snail?
•Shakespeare, As You Like It (1599?).
References: Musil: trans. Sophie Wilkins (Vintage, 1996; Hung: trans. Chao Tze-chiang, A Chinese Garden of Serenity (Peter Pauper, 1959); Aelian: trans. A.F. Scholfield, On the Characteristics of Animals II (Loeb) (Harvard UP, 1971); Aesop: trans. Olivia & Robert Temple, The Complete Fables (Penguin, 1998); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.