Bearskin Quotes

“The giant trees were like dormant gods, vibrating with something he couldn't name, not quite sentience, each one different from the others, each telling its own centuries-long story.”
― James A. McLaughlin, Bearskin

“So many people hate snakes. I think it's because they threaten people's worldview- they're alien, limbless, impossible, black magic: a stick come to life. But maybe we're all sticks come to life...We want to think we're exceptional, ensouled, angel fairies or God's special children. The magic of being animate matter isn't enough.”
― James A. McLaughlin, Bearskin

“when you slack off, what you’re really doing is choosing to fail because you didn’t try hard enough. It was a rational choice, his father had said, for people who would rather fail on purpose than risk finding out they’re not good enough, but if you made that choice you should at least be honest with yourself about what you were doing.”
― James A. McLaughlin, Bearskin

“Far away the sun lifted water from the oceans and rained it back onto the land. Life squirmed and sprouted, inhaling, exhaling, it spoke and wept, hatched and died.”
― James A. McLaughlin, Bearskin

“The sun had reached the horizon, and the crickets slowed their chirping as the air began to cool. Sunset and sunrise, he thought, the edges of the day, were the only times you could see the sun move. It touched the top of the ridge and began to disappear. He reminded himself that it was the earth's rotation, that the sun itself only seemed to move, but what difference did that make? He felt he was watching time itself pass. The last bright quarter shrank to an eighth, a sixteenth, a point, and then nothing, the sun's dark negative lingering in his retina.”
― James A. McLaughlin, Bearskin

“He was climbing into his truck when he saw something on the spring box, an animal perched there, absolutely still, watching him. The creature was inky blank, dark as a hole in the world.”
― James A. McLaughlin, Bearskin

“He found it puzzling that so many rural people were hostile to, even terrified of, the place where they lived. It wasn't just that hard-working country folk had no time for the precious concerns of the effete urban environmentalists, what amazed Rice was how you could spend your whole life physically immersed in a particular ecological system and yet remain blinded to it by superstition, tradition, prejudice. Out west, it was ranchers' holy war on predators and their veneration of Indo-European domestic animals they husbanded on land too dry to support them. Here in the Appalachians, you saw rugged country men who refused to walk in the woods all summer because they were scared of snakes.”
― James A. McLaughlin, Bearskin

“While he watched, a fresh breeze brushed against the big tulip trees, red oaks, sugar maples. Heavy branches rose and fell in slow motion, and a million leaves twisted on their stems, showing silver underneath. The forest was eerily animate, a gigantic green beast dreaming, its skin twitching and rippling. Not quite threatening, but powerful. Watchful.”
― James A. McLaughlin, Bearskin

“Yeah it’s a race thing. Us Negro-Cherokee half-breeds what live up Sycamore Creek ain’t good enough to wax Bilton Stiller’s monster truck.” “Hunh.” Rice hadn’t realized the social dynamics of northwestern Turpin County were so complicated. “You don’t know what that means either, do you?” “I know what a monster truck is.” “It means people like the Stillers need to believe there’s somebody they’re better than. You also didn’t know they was messing with you at the Beer & Eat when they sent you up to my place looking for a bear hound.”
― James A. McLaughlin, Bearskin

“He’d been having death dreams more often of late. Sometimes he felt like he was rehearsing, as if his subconscious had decided he needed practice, as if we learn how to die in our dreams.”
― James A. McLaughlin, Bearskin

“Ever since he’d moved to Virginia, Rice had engaged in a nearly religious practice of keeping himself to himself, employing a human analogue to the behavioral strategies of certain prey species: drab coloring, quiet habits, never leaving cover, avoiding conflict.”
― James A. McLaughlin, Bearskin

“A few bats jerked and swooped against the stars, echolocating bugs. They should be hibernating by now and he wondered if they were sick with white-nose disease, staying out too long, desperate to build up calorie reserves that might or might not see them through the winter. No other creature perceived the world through echolocation in quite the same way as these microbats, and when they were gone, their umwelt would disappear forever. A universe snuffed out of existence.”
― James A. McLaughlin, Bearskin

“the bundle,”
― James A. McLaughlin, Bearskin

“The hot sun pressed on his shoulders, the air outside clean and pleasant to breathe. Dragonflies swooped and hovered over a fecund riot of chest-high bluestem and orchard grass.”
― James A. McLaughlin, Bearskin

“Being brave sometimes entailed preferring physical danger to whatever psychic distress would come from avoiding that danger.”
― James A. McLaughlin, Bearskin

“He breathed and settled into the ground, feeling Earth’s motion in his bones, the slow spin of the planet, ponderous on its axis, traveling in its accustomed arc around the sun. Continental plates ground and shattered. Far away the sun lifted water from the oceans and rained it back onto the land. Life squirmed and sprouted, inhaling, exhaling, it spoke and wept, hatched and died.”
― James A. McLaughlin, Bearskin

“You and them folks own the place got to remember there’s families around here been hunting bear up on that mountain ever since their great-great-granddaddies run off the Real People two hundred years ago, and there ain’t a thing in the world you or anyone else can do to stop ’em. You keep on like you are, it’ll turn into a war, one you won’t like much.”
― James A. McLaughlin, Bearskin

“Bear bile is used in a variety of traditional Asian medicines, and the growth of a relatively affluent middle class in China and other Asian countries led to unprecedented consumer demand. News reports from the nineties and early aughts often compared bile and bile salt prices to that of cocaine and gold. Given the near-extinction of every Asiatic bear species, dealers looked to the American black bear, and a lucrative black market in their gallbladders briefly caught the attention of U.S. news media”
― James A. McLaughlin, Bearskin

“As most markets legit and otherwise had globalized over the past few decades, illegal traffic in wildlife and their body parts had become the fourth-largest black market in the world,”
― James A. McLaughlin, Bearskin

“As the caretaker of the Turk Mountain Preserve, he represented wealthy outsiders and a preservation ethic that seemed nonsensical and elitist to the locals. The hostility apparently was bad enough it had driven his predecessor to leave the job.”
― James A. McLaughlin, Bearskin

“He held the stinger in the sunlight, close to his face, looking for his future there, extispicy in miniature.”
― James A. McLaughlin, Bearskin

“hump of his body, a thousand bees orbiting his head like electrons. Then he”
― James A. McLaughlin, Bearskin