How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
I saw color-patches for weeks […] it was summer; the peaches were ripe in the valley orchards. When I woke in the morning, color-patches wrapped around my eyes, intricately, leaving not one unfilled spot. (2.29)
Dillard learns about seeing from reading about those who can't. Blind people who were given sight were unable to conceptualize the world in anything other than fields of color; learning about their perception changes her own.
Quote #2
After half an hour, the last of the stragglers had vanished into the trees. I stood with difficulty, bashed by the unexpectedness of this beauty, and my spread lungs roared. (3.15)
Dillard is amazed by the flight of the starlings the state has spent so much time and money trying to exterminate. In the nuisance, she sees the beauty.
Quote #3
There are seven or eight categories of phenomena in the world that are worth talking about, and one of them is the weather. (3.35)
The weather is the great icebreaker, as it were. We use it as an introduction, we use it to fill space, we use it as a conversation we can have when we feel uncomfortable. Taking about the weather serves a social purpose.
Quote #4
I've lived there. I remember what the city has to offer: human companionship, major-league baseball, and a clatter of quickening stimulus like a rush from strong drugs that leaves you drained. (6.16)
The "human companionship" part is debatable. It's easy to become anonymous and isolated in the city, and just because you're surrounded by people doesn't mean they're your companions.
Quote #5
The general rule in nature is that things are soft within and rigid without. We vertebrates are living dangerously, and we vertebrates are positively piteous, like so many peeled trees. (6.40)
Dillard realizes that what trees and insects have in common is their protective outer shell. Humans could use some bark or chitin to protect us from the elements (and each other).
Quote #6
It looks for the moment as though I might have to reject the creek life unless I want to be utterly brutalized. Is human culture with its values my only real home after all? […]
Either this world, my mother, is a monster, or I myself am a freak. (10.56-57)
When you see things more deeply than other people, it's easy to feel like you're not even part of the human species. Dillard realizes the total improbability of life, which makes her feel like the murderous world is out to get us all.
Quote #7
And nature is a fan dancer born with a fan; you can wrestle her down, throw her on the stage and grapple with her for the fan with all your might, but it will never quit her grip. She comes that way; the fan is attached. (11.63)
Dillard's talking about the impossibility of predicting what an individual will do, even if you can predict the behavior of a group—this is true of both muskrats and subatomic particles. There's only so much we can know about nature, so ultimately, it's beautiful and inscrutable and improbable.
Quote #8
[…] the physical world as we understand it now is more like the touch-and-go creek world I see than it is like the abiding world of which the mountains seem to speak. (11.67)
If you judge the world by the mountains, it never seems to move. If you judge it by the creeks, though, it never seems to stop.
Quote #9
A little blood from the wrists and throat is the price I would willingly pay for that pressure of clacking weights on my shoulders, for the scent of deserts, groundfire in my ears – for being so in the clustering thick of things, rapt and enwrapped in the rising and falling real world. (12.50)
Yeah, she's talking about being eaten by grasshoppers here, which is a thing that can happen. We're going to pretend we didn't know that. We invite you to join us in our denial.