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.
--
The Man in a Case (1898)Anton Chekhov
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I mean to lead a simple life, to choose a simple shell I can carry easily — like a hermit crab. But I do not. I find that my frame of life does not foster simplicity. My husband and five children must make their way in the world. The life I have chosen as a wife and mother entrains a whole caravan of complications.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
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
In short, the root-head turns the crab into a Darwinian cipher, a feeding machine working entirely in the parasite's service. The castrated crab can make no contribution to its own evolutionary history; its "Darwinian fitness" has become flat zero. ...But ever so carefully, for the parasite must maintain the crab in constant and perfect servitude - not draining the host enough to kill this golden goose, but not letting the crab do anything for its own Darwinian benefit.
Stephen Jay Gould
We hope the "real" person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell.
John Updike
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
Chekhov, Anton
Chelcicky, Petr
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