Phoebe Snetsinger Quotes

Emotion and personal desire really do reign in all passionate endeavors, not objectivity and reason. And sometimes we’re just plain lucky enough to get away with it.

Of course, as my husband points out, this game never really ends. It’s simply a matter of perspective; as I see it, one of the wonderful aspects of birding is that it is endless. There’s always, as long as one lives, some new place to go, some exciting new thing to find. No one knowledgeable will ever say, “I’ve done it all – now what?”

The triggers for turning points in one’s life are mysterious things. A whole spectrum of different factors with complex physical, intellectual, and emotional overtones is involved, and all of them have to merge in the same place and time to form the blinding white light that urges one along a new path. Sheer chance plays an enormous role, unless one is programmed to believe (as I do not) that it was all meant to be.

I desperately wanted to continue running my own life, because I was healthy and, physically, felt just fine. I accepted the fact that my life wasn’t going to last long, but I very quickly came to the conclusion that I preferred a short span of quality living under my control, followed by a quick death, to a longer life protracted by various all-consuming medical treatments and their effects, probably followed by a lingering death.

Black-necked Cranes on the Tibetan plateau were my last of this family and left me with some unexpectedly ambivalent feelings—triumph at having finally seen them all, yet sadness that there were now no more left to look for.

Chances are, if I can feel a lump, there has already been some spread to internal organs, in which case my time of health is probably limited to a few months. Now may well be my final opportunity to go birding on a foreign trip, and I can’t just throw that away. If it’s my last trip, so be it—but I’m going to make it a good one and go down binoculars in hand!

There were indeed human hazards in this country—but not to go there at all because of the possibility of encountering them? Unthinkable! It has become ever more clear to me that if I had spent my life avoiding any and all potential risks, I would have missed doing most of the things that have comprised of the best years of my life.

“How can they ever get food into those fuzzy chicks without stabbing them to death with their bills?” Watching those creatures do what they had been doing successfully for millions of years, without any help from us, finally let me learn not to judge everything by human standards.

I hadn’t done much traveling in Arab countries, and it’s certainly not my favorite culture (a common enough viewpoint among emancipated western women), but both geographically and ornithologically I found it fascinating.