Snapper Quotes

“A list of birds seen on a given day is also a form of prayer, a thanksgiving for being alive at a certain time and place. Posting that list online is a 21st-century form of a votive offering.”
― Brian Kimberling, Snapper

“From remote and sparsely populated Vermont, Indiana seemed hopeless; a collection of turtle-shooting subliterates--people opposed to evolution, pluralism, and poetry.

And yet. Those leaves.”
― Brian Kimberling, Snapper

“It takes no skill to find a bald eagle. You look for flat rabbits on country roads. Wait a while and the national emblem will appear, menace anything that got there first, and plunge his majestic head deep in a mass of entrails. Alternatively, you can follow some industrious hawk through swamp or bottomland forest until he dispatches a squirrel; an eagle is likely to descend, savage the smaller bird, and steal his prize. The eagle can hunt, of course; he just prefers not to. Benjamin Franklin called him a bird of bad moral character. It takes no skill to find the nest, either. Look for a shipwreck in a tree, layered in feces . . . The likeliest impediment to (the eagles’) reproductive success was a human observer bungling around twice a day, but their welfare was almost incidental anyway. The point was for patriotic human hearts to swell with pride on outdoor weekends, and convincing replicas would have sufficed; the compulsive monitoring was not good husbandry, just an expression of national guilt. I did what I was paid for. Privately I sided with the furred and feathered residents of the area who must have wondered why humans were loosing winged hyenas in their midst . . . They’re glorified vultures. An apex predator that never hunts. Absurd.”
― Brian Kimberling, Snapper

“It was only when I returned that I viewed Indiana through such a jaundiced eye. While there I tried desperately to gather the whole state around me and make it cohere. I don't mean to say that I enjoyed living there, either; rather, the state itself was my own lifelong imbroglio.”
― Brian Kimberling, Snapper

“Dismemberment, even posthumous, is obscene.”
― Brian Kimberling, Snapper

“Well, that's one afternoon shot to hell,' I said. 'No,' said Shane. 'Other people are watching TV.”
― Brian Kimberling, Snapper

“Somewhere in that ancient brain it knows that you are an idiot with a stick, to be endured, and that tomorrow there will be fish to catch. It can't, like other turtles, withdraw into its shell, but, serious and adult, it will not rise to your childish taunts.”
― Brian Kimberling, Snapper