Rebecca Stott > Quotes

“Science doesn't reduce things, or explain mysteries away; it just discovers stranger and stranger things.”
― Rebecca Stott, Ghostwalk

“On July 29, six days after I had arrived in Paris, Fin and I moved into the new lodgings on the top floor of the hotel next door, where, beyond the pigeons who occupied the window ledge, you could see the turrets of Notre Dame. The concierge told us not to feed the birds, but we gave them our stale bread just the same, and so our flock became a feathered multitude, pushing and shoving one another behind the cracked glass. In the afternoons the light seemed to have feathers in it.”
― Rebecca Stott, The Coral Thief

“It's only when you've pieced together a story in several different ways that you realise where the holes are, discover the knowledge that is still missing, the questions you still need to ask.”
― Rebecca Stott, Ghostwalk

“Beyond this point on the river Cambridge became a kind of miniature Venice, its river water lapping up against the ancient stone of college walls, here mottled and reddened brick, there white stone. Stained, lichened, softened by water light. Here the river became a great north-south tunnel, a gothic castle from the river, flanked by locked iron gates, steps leading nowhere, labyrinths, trapdoors, landing stages where barges had unloaded their freight: crates of fine wines, flour, oats, candles, fine meats carried into the damp darkness of college cellars.”
― Rebecca Stott, Ghostwalk

“Paris is an ocean," a lawyer called Honoré said to me in a bar on the place Vendôme later that night. We were very drunk. "You can take as many soundings as you like, but you'll never reach the bottom of it. You can survey it, draw it, describe it. But, however thorough you are, however careful and scrupulous, something is always just beyond your reach. There will always be another unmapped cave, monsters, pearls, things undreamt of, overlooked by everyone else.”
― Rebecca Stott

“I didn't like crab. Not at all. My stepmother had tricked my into eating a crab sandwich once in a cafe in Cromer, told me it was tuna. I'd never forgiven her.”
― Rebecca Stott, Ghostwalk

“Stepping into the smell of a long-abandoned aple crop, Cameron called towards the house, hoping to catch his mother's attention in the window where she would be sitting working”
― Rebecca Stott, Ghostwalk

“The oyster’s radar and defensive mechanisms are critical for its survival, for mouths other than human mouths hunger for oyster flesh. Oysters have several principal predators: the starfish wraps its arms around the oyster, forces its shell apart and ingests it; the boring sponge bores tiny holes in its shell, honeycombing it with tunnels; the slipper-limpet and the mussel smother the oysters or starve them by attaching themselves to an oyster’s shell and eating all their food; the dog-whelk and the whelk-tingle also bore into the shell and suck out the flesh.
The oyster, beset by such enemies, writes M.F.K. Fisher, ‘lives motionless, soundless, her own cold ugly shape her only dissipation, and if she escapes the menace of duck-slipper-mussel Black-Drum-leech-sponge-borer-starfish, it is for man to eat because of man’s own hunger’.”
― Rebecca Stott, Oyster

“Isn't it always unfair - death always a kind of outrage? A life ended too soon with jagged and torn edges, a sentence incomplete.”
― Rebecca Stott, Ghostwalk

“In the first century ad, the Spanish-born Roman poet Martial wrote an epigram addressed to his patron, Ponticus, complaining about the poorer food that his patron served to his lower status guests at his banquets. Ponticus reserved his Lucrine oysters for himself and his most important guests; there were to be no oysters for the poet:

Now I get a proper invitation to dinner since my days as a paid entertainer are past, why am I given a different dinner from you? You feed on big fat oysters from the Lucrine lagoon; I’m left sucking mussel shells and split lips. You get the choicest mushrooms, I get fungus pigs won’t touch. You toy with turbot; I’m down there with the catfish. You stuff yourself with fine roast peacock, its rump indecently plump; laid out on my plate is the kitchen canary’s corpse – found dead of old age in its cage. Why don’t we dine together, Ponticus, when I come to dinner with you? No longer being hired to come could be a step up the social ladder – if we supped the same.”
― Rebecca Stott, Oyster

“شكلت شعاب أصداف المحار جزرًا بنى عليها البشر بيوتهم. فهناك في السنغال -مثلًا- على الساحل جنوب داكار، جزيرة تسمى فاديوث تتصل باليابسة بواسطة جسر. وفي الأصل كانت هذه أرخبيلًا تشكل خلال ملايين السنين بأصداف محار القرم. وهو المحار الذي ينمو على الجذور المديدة لأشجار القرم.
يسافر الناس بين جزيرة وأخرى بالزوارق ويصطادون المحار، يجذفون عبر المياه الضحلة المرصوفة بالمحار، المحاطة بأشجار الباوباب الاستوائية التي تقتات على الكالسيوم. والشوارع محاطة بأصداف البحر، وفي المقبرة دُفن المسلمون والكاثوليك تحت تلال أصداف المحار البيضاء المدهشة المظللة بأشجار القرم.”
― Rebecca Stott, Oyster

“Many people assume that leaving a cult like the Brethren must be exhilarating. ‘You had no TV or pop music or cinema,’ they say, ‘and then you did? It must have been amazing!’ But when you see interviews with people who have recently left cults, they describe feeling bewildered and frightened; their eyes dart around, searching for points of reference, metaphors that would get somewhere close to describing the feeling of being lost, not-at-home, without walls.”
― Rebecca Stott, In the Days of Rain: A Daughter, a Father, a Cult

“every man endowed with reason may know that God did not create His creation to no purpose, and did not abandon His creatures to their fate; that he overlooked nothing, left nothing without his distinctive mark, nothing in disorder or unprotected; that He makes no mistakes in His wondrous farsightedness and no detail of His dispositions fails him, nor yet the beauty of wisdom and the glory of the powerful proof. All of that activity extends to everything from the louse and the butterfly to the seven celestial spheres and the seven climates of the globe.”
― Rebecca Stott, Darwin's Ghosts: The Secret History of Evolution

“إن رادار المحار، وآلياته الدفاعية حاسمة لأجل بقائه؛ لأن أفواهًا أخرى عدا الأفواه البشرية تواقة لأكل لحمه. فللمحار مفترسون أساسيون عدة: يلف نجم البحر أذرعه حول المحار، يفتح صدفتيه بالقوة ويبتلعه، يثقب الأسفنج الثقَّاب ثقوبًا صغيرة في صدفته، يمصه عبر أنابيب، ويخنق البطلينوس الخُفي وبلح البحر المحار أو يجوعانه بالالتصاق بصدفته وأكل طعامه كله، يثقب الحلزون الكلبي، والحلزون الواخز الصدفة ويمصان اللحم. وفي وسط أعداء كهؤلاء، تكتب م. ف. ك. فيشر، "يعيش من دون حركة، ودون صوت، جسمه البارد القبيح هو رفاهيته الوحيدة، وإن نجا من خطر كل هؤلاء الذين ذكرناهم، فإنه من نصيب الإنسان ليشبع جوعه".”
― Rebecca Stott, Oyster

“Oyster-shell reefs have formed islands on which humans have built their homes. In Senegal, on the coast south of Dakar, for instance, there is an island called Fadiouth joined to the mainland by a bridge; this is actually an archipelago formed over millions of years by the shells of mangrove oysters, oysters that grow on the extensive tree roots of mangrove trees.
The people travel from one island to another and fish for oysters by canoe, paddling across a lagoon paved with oysters, and lined by baobab trees which feed on calcium. The streets are lined with oyster-shells, and in the cemetery, Muslims and Catholics are buried under startlingly white oyster-shell mounds in the shade of the mangrove trees.”
― Rebecca Stott, Oyster

“But Nonor always said that the Fates don’t carve, they weave. Isla does her best to make sure her sister always remembers that. The Fates take the threads that we make from the things we do, Nonor would say, the choices we make, big ones and small ones, all of them, and they weave them in and out, through and under, all the time. They never stop their weave. But they can only use the threads we give them.”
― Rebecca Stott, Dark Earth

“[P]erhaps at midnight, when all boundaries are lost, the country reverts to its ancient shape, as the Romans saw it, lying cloudy, when they landed, and the hills had no names and rivers wound they knew not where. —Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway”
― Rebecca Stott, Dark Earth

“Hypnagogic and hypnopompic,” he said, as if he was used to diagnosing the odd conditions of dinner companions like this all the time. “They’re hallucinations that happen when you are falling asleep—hypnagogic—and when you wake up—hypnopompic.” He’d had them too, he told me. And so had Vladimir Nabokov. He urged me to read Nabokov’s description of them in his memoir, Speak Memory.”
― Rebecca Stott, In the Days of Rain: A Daughter, a Father, a Cult

“The great skill in lying is not lying, you'd say. Just leaving things out. Keeping everything as close to the actual truth as possible. Nothing overblown.”
― Rebecca Stott, Ghostwalk

“In a poem by William Cowper (1731–1800), ‘The Poet, The
Oyster and the Sensitive Plant’, the poet uses the oyster to
philosophize on sensitivity and suffering in the animal and
vegetable worlds.

The poem opens with the oyster bemoaning
its fate:

Ah hapless wretch! Condemned to dwell
For ever in my native shell,
Ordain’d to move when others please,
Not for my own content or ease,
But toss’d and buffeted about,
Now in the water, and now out.
‘Twere better to be born a stone
Of ruder shape and feeling none,
Than with a tenderness like mine,
And sensibilities so fine!”
― Rebecca Stott, Oyster