horizon line

p. 77

Maybe soon he'd have to face the fact that everything from here on in was going to make him think of Opal. He thought of her whenever he saw light at play. He though of her while he was seining paper for a capture in the fixative and he thought of her when he saw buttermilk-colored moths mirror-flashing through the bluegrass of an abandoned lot.

p. 85

They looked like eggs -- more round, at least, than angly with the palest thinnest skin the white race has to offer and a degree of hairlessness that rivaled channel swimmers and would have kept Mr. Gillette awake at night had he got wind of their existence in the gene pool.

p. 95

It was said Tennessee River cats would do anything to escape that over-populated river. The river was so thick with catfish it was said that you could stroll across it from the eastern shore to Knoxville City on their backs. It was said there are more catfish in the Tennessee than there are fish in all the oceans of the world. More catfish in Knox County than there are Christians, more catfish on supper plates than flies. More catfish in Knox County bellies than dreams inside Knox County heads. More ways to cook a catfish than to skin a cat. More meat on a catfish than on a fatted calf. Half the gossip that you hear in town involved the federal government, a married woman or a swindle. Other half involved a cat.

p. 99

A swarm of dragonflies was breaking up the light above the water into a series of discontinuous images like the ones that used to skip through old-time movies.

p. 120

All those fishes down there in the river in the water where you couldn't see them, swimming round living out their lives feeding mating giving birth and dying -- if you think about that river as a limit of existence then you start to think about the water of that river and all the waters on the earth and in earth's atmosphere, and then you have to think about those sums of water and they are a limit of existence, too, how all of us are as limited in our native element, captives in our glasshouse atmosphere, as the fish are in the Tennessee.

p. 216

How can you identify what you don't know if you don't know it? The great Unknown is not a static. It is peopled. Scattered through with specificity. It's a havoc. Knowledge is at large, for taking, like the air. Still, she thought, there was so much she didn't know that seemed to be the common stuff of other peoples' lives. How to know which books to read. How to read for learning. How to write a letter or a sentence which described the world the way the Mr. Frost described a wood. Or Mr. Eliot the state of solitude.

p. 219

Do you know Mr. Einstein says that the atoms in your body are the same -- the same, exactly -- as the atoms that make up the stars? It's like one big lending library out there. A piece of what was once a star or something, a flower or a willow tree, when it is finished bein' that might be loaned away an' become a fish or a person's fingernail or evaporate in the sky and be a rainbow. That the -- what did he call'em? -- stuff that makes your atoms up an' mine, that stuff mixed up a little different is the sum of all the stuff that's in existence. Did you know that? Fos? That you maybe once mighta been -- I don't know -- a star?

She watched him while he wiped his glasses clean before he answered. When people die on us, he said. We tend to wanta try to make believe the world's a bigger place than perhaps it actually is. That all of life is bigger. So it can include the person who's passed on. We tend to wanta try to make the world a place where we can hope that person is still with us. Some way. Some people call it Heaven. You call it a rainbow or a willow tree.

p. 221

While she drove she looked for places -- heights from which to send him. She wondered how to say 'goodbye' -- but then she understood that thinking about what to say was another way of saying it. That thinking about what to say was something that would be ongoing for the rest of her life -- the ongoing soliloquy inside one's mind that sounds like talking with the dead.

p. 243

Possession, so they tell us, is nine-tenths the law. Once you've got ahold of something -- anything -- it may as well be yours; and in a sanctioned land of cousins, coming home with someone else's baby, calling it your own, is the stuff of everyday occurrence.

p. 246

It turned a godforsaken ornery bastard of a cursed and temperamental river prone to sudden drastic flooding into a calm and navigable chain of firthy lakes as picture-postcard perfect as an alpine idyll. It was like converting lightning into a string of pearls.

p. 266

Youth never sees its shadow till the sun's about to set: and then you wonder where the person went who you were speaking to in all your thoughts for all those years.

p. 363

You can only be in two places at the same time -- the past and the present, Tennessee and California -- if you are there, in one of them, while thinking of the other. Or talking about one place while being in the other. Or reading about it. Or having someone read to you.

p. 371

Flash made chitchat the way a hawk might ask a chicken, What's for supper?