Of Time and Turtles Quotes

“In the 1980s and 1990s, psychologists finally coined a term for what the traumatologist Charles Finely called “the cost of caring”: compassion fatigue. It’s a complex of symptoms including exhaustion, irritability, and anger resulting from caring for others who are afflicted by fear and suffering. Also known as “secondhand shock,” compassion fatigue is the bane of wildlife rehabilitators and veterinarians—as well as doctors and nurses coping with emergencies like battlefields, natural disasters, and pandemics. Compassion fatigue can exact a terrible physical toll—including headache, sleeplessness, weight loss, and chronic exhaustion—but worst of all is what Carla Joinson first noted was happening to her overextended fellow nurses: losing their “ability to nurture.”
― Sy Montgomery, Of Time and Turtles: Mending the World, Shell by Shattered Shell

“Caring deeply comes at a cost. The word compassion contains within itself its emotional price. The prefix com means “with”; the Latin root pati (from which we get the word passion as in the Passion of Christ) means “suffering.” To feel compassion, then, is to enter into another’s suffering, to suffer along with them. Carl Frederick Buechner, theologian and author, defines compassion as “the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside someone else’s skin. It is the knowledge that there can never be any peace and joy for me until there is finally peace and joy for you.”
― Sy Montgomery, Of Time and Turtles: Mending the World, Shell by Shattered Shell

“The rhythmic songs of crickets and grey tree frogs sound to me like little clocks. But instead of ticking time away-time going, going, gone-they seem to be accumulating time, season after season of mystery, wisdom, and wonder. With each trill and chirp and throb, these voices are keeping turtle time, renewing the covenants that keep the world alive, and offering us the gift of eternity.”
― Sy Montgomery, Of Time and Turtles: Mending the World, Shell by Shattered Shell

“Never give up on a turtle. Because turtles never give up.”
― Sy Montgomery, Of Time and Turtles: Mending the World, Shell by Shattered Shell

“If people had more understanding of geologic time, we’d be less selfish and greedy, and think about the future.” It almost seems as if Cris is living in a different time-world than the rest of us. The rest of us humans, that is. At the moment of the world’s most urgent extinction crises, he radiates calm. Amid a culture of hurry and hunger, he remains contented. He holds, at once, the in-the-moment present and the far-off future, and faces them both with composed persistence. He is living in turtle time. Turtle people are not your ordinary, run-of-the mill humans. Matt and I are staying at the TSA’s intern guesthouse, an immaculate mobile home on a site where the former occupant raised rats for a living (and whose trailer was eventually relocated”
― Sy Montgomery, Of Time and Turtles: Mending the World, Shell by Shattered Shell

“understanding of geologic time, we’d be less selfish and greedy, and think about the future.”
― Sy Montgomery, Of Time and Turtles: Mending the World, Shell by Shattered Shell

“But one might hope that both animals, if allowed to naturally attain the end of their vastly different life spans, may experience a full measure of life....."Everybody in their bones knows that something is eternal," the Stage Manager tells the audience. The dead are at peace, knowing that at the end of their waiting, the eternal part of their selves, like a turtle in the spring, will emerge.”
― Sy Montgomery, Of Time and Turtles: Mending the World, Shell by Shattered Shell