Pilgrim At Tinker Creek Quotes
"We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence…."
"The least we can do is try to be there."
"Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac."
"I come to it as to an oracle; I return to it as a man years later will seek out the battlefield where he lost a leg or an arm."
"I am the arrow shaft, carved along my length by unexpected lights and gashes from the very sky, and this book is the straying trail of blood."
"The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand."
"It was like dying, that growing dimmer and deeper and then going out."
"I am an explorer, then, and I am also a stalker, or the instrument of the hunt itself."
"It’s the most beautiful day of the year."
"Adult mantises eat more or less everything that breathes and is small enough to capture."
"When mantises hatch in the wild, however, they straggle about prettily, dodging ants, till all are lost in the grass."
"The mating rites of mantises are well known: a chemical produced in the head of the male insect says, 'No, don’t go near her, you fool, she’ll eat you alive.'"
"Nature is, above all, profligate. Don’t believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil."
"The mockingbird that dropped furled from a roof…but this is no time to count my dead."
"Birdsong catches in the mountains’ rim and pools in the valley; it threads through forests, it slides down creeks."
"The future is the light on the water; it comes, mediated, only on the skin of the real and present creek."
"Trees stir memories; live waters heal them."
"The present is the wave that explodes over my head, flinging the air with particles at the height of its breathless unroll."
"The road to Grundy, Virginia, is, as you might expect, a narrow scrawl scribbled all over the most improbably peaked and hunched mountains you ever saw."
"One child was collecting [newts] in a Thermos mug to take home to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to feed an ailing cayman."
"Their specific gravity put them just a jot below the water’s surface, and they could apparently relax just as well with lowered heads as lowered tails."
"The tulip-tree leaf reminded me of a newborn mammal I’d seen the other day."
"There’s a real power here. It is amazing that trees can turn gravel and bitter salts into these soft-lipped lobes."
"The patch of bluets in the grass may not be long on brains, but it might be, at least in a very small way, awake."
"I left the woods, spreading silence before me in a wave."
"Finally I saw some very small children playing with a striped orange kitten."
"You open the door and all heaven and hell break loose."
"Every year a given tree creates absolutely from scratch ninety-nine percent of its living parts."
"The old Kabbalistic phrase is 'the Mystery of the Splintering of the Vessels.'"
"I am sitting here looking at a goldfish bowl and busting my brain."
"The beginning is swaddled in mists, blasted by random blinding flashes."
"The whole world is in flood, the land as well as the water."
"It’s like a dragon. Maybe it’s because the bridge we are on is chancy."
"I see engorged, motionless ants regurgitate pap to a colony of pawing workers."
"A cup of duck-pond water looks like a seething broth."
"The world is full of creatures that for some reason seem stranger to us than others."
"The lone ping into being of the first hydrogen atom ex nihilo was so unthinkably, violently radical."
"I remembered the ocean, and I seemed to be in the ocean myself."
"The whole earth seems to slide like sand down a chute."
"The faster death goes, the faster evolution goes."
"The world has locusts, and the world has grasshoppers."
"If this creekside garden is sorrow, then I seek martyrdom."
"You can perfect your instruments and your methods till the cows come home, and you will never ever be able to measure this one basic thing."
"Every minute on a square mile of this land—one ten thousandth of an ounce of starlight spatters to earth."
"It is astonishing how many people cannot, or will not, hold still."
"I am King of the Meadow, I thought, and raised my arms."
"The whole universe is a swarm of those wild, wary energies."
"The bobwhite’s very helplessness, his obstinate Johnny-two-notedness, takes on an aura of dogged pluck."
"I lay still. Could I feel in the air an invisible sweep and surge, and an answering knock in my lungs?"
"Night risings and fallings filled my mind, free excursions carried out invisibly while the air swung up and back and the starlight rained."
"Sometimes a breath or call stirs the colony, and new forms emerge with wings."
"The sentence in Teale is simple: 'On cool autumn nights, eels hurrying to the sea sometimes crawl for a mile or more across dewy meadows to reach streams that will carry them to salt water.'"
"Why didn’t God let the animals in Eden name the man; why didn’t I wrestle the grasshopper on my shoulder and pin him down till he called my name?"
"Each falling ball seems to trail beauty as its afterimage, receding faintly down the air, almost disappearing, when lo, another real ball falls, shedding its transparent beauty, and another…"
"I am puffed clay, blown up and set down. That I fall like Adam is not surprising: I plunge, waft, arc, pour, and dive."
"I didn’t know, I never have known, what spirit it is that descends into my lungs and flaps near my heart like an eagle rising."
"The only other poisonous snake around here is the timber rattler, Crotalus horridus horridus."
"The prospect is wide open, but—although most of my favorite entomologists seem to revel in these creatures—the prospect is, to me at least, scarcely inviting."
"The lives of insects and their parasites are horribly entwined."
"The creator is no puritan. A creature need not work for a living; creatures may simply steal and suck and be blessed for all that with a share—an enormous share—of the sunlight and air."
"Let us love the country of here below. It is real; it offers resistance to love."
"The gaps are the cliffs in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery."
"Go your way, eat the fat, and drink the sweet, said the bell. A sixteenth-century alchemist wrote of the philosopher’s stone, 'One finds it in the open country, in the village and in the town. It is in everything which God created. Maids throw it on the street. Children play with it.'"