How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
It would take twenty or thirty men at least, strung out at intervals and walking straight through the forest, and even then they could miss him, dead or alive, accident or suicide or murder. (5.50)
The narrator is mulling the condition in which she and the other searchers are likely to find her father. She's not super-optimistic that he's alive.
Quote #2
I thought, I suppose I knew it from the beginning, I shouldn't have tried to find out, it's killed him. I had the proof now, indisputable, of sanity and therefore of death. Relief, grief, I must have felt one or the other. A blank, a disappointment: crazy people can come back, from wherever they go to take refuge, but dead people can't, they are prohibited. (12.26)
Upon finding some weird drawings her father did of animal-human hybrid creatures, the narrator briefly thinks that he has gone mad—and so, he might still be alive. In this moment, she's realizing that her father was tracing local cave paintings. As a result, she has gone back to assuming he is dead.
Quote #3
"Sometimes I think he'd like me to die," Anna said, "I have dreams about it." (14.53)
Although it's not immediately apparent, David and Anna's dynamic takes on a distinctly nasty tone when we learn how much glee he takes in controlling Anna's looks and behavior (e.g., by making her feel like she has to wear makeup to avoid issues with him). Apparently, things are so bad that Anna even thinks he'd like her to die. The comment comes out of nowhere, but that doesn't make it any less sinister—on the contrary, it's more so.
Quote #4
I didn't want there to be wars and death, I wanted them not to exist; only rabbits with their coloured egg houses, sun and moon orderly above the flat earth, summer always, I wanted everyone to be happy. But his pictures were more accurate, the weapons, the disintegrating soldiers: he was a realist, that protected him. He almost drowned once but he would never allow that to happen again, by the time he left he was ready. (15.41)
Here, the narrator is thinking about her brother, who apparently had a bit of a violent streak. While the narrator was drawing pictures of bunnies and the moon, her brother was drawing soldiers and weapons—in short, she avoided thinking about or representing death, and he (having already confronted death as a child in a near-drowning accident) embraced it.
Quote #5
The trouble some people have being German, I thought, I have being human. In a way it was stupid to be more disturbed by a dead bird than by those other things, the wars and riots and the massacres in the newspapers. But for the wars and riots there was always an explanation, people wrote books about them saying why they happened: the death of the heron was causeless, undiluted. (15.38)
Coming across a dead heron in the woods really upsets the narrator—she seems more traumatized by the needless brutality involved in killing that bird than she is by anything else (including her father's death). She suggests, of course, that she can deal with death when there's a point to it, but the notion of just killing something because really gets her upset.
Quote #6
Whether it died willingly, consented, whether Christ died willingly, anything that suffers and dies instead of us is Christ; if they didn't kill birds and fish they would have killed us. The animals die that we may live, they are substitute people, hunters in the fall killing the deer, that is Christ also. (17.1)
Now the narrator is musing that the human instinct to kill other humans is somehow sublimated or satisfied by killing animals. She attributes this instinct to the "Americans" who supposedly killed the heron.
Quote #7
It was there but it wasn't a painting, it wasn't on the rock. It was below me, drifting towards me from the furthest level where there was no life, a dark oval trailing limbs. It was blurred but it had eyes, they were open, it was something I knew about, a dead thing, it was dead. (17.8)
When the narrator is diving down in a lake near her father's cabin, she comes across this weird squid-like creature, which apparently is dead. We don't really have all the pieces of this vision's significance yet, but apparently the narrator found it pretty meaningful. With the mystery of the narrator's missing father, the novel set us up to expect the discovery of "a dead thing," but this isn't exactly what we thought was coming.
Quote #8
I know when it was, it was in a bottle curled up, staring out at me like a cat pickled; it had huge jelly eyes and fins instead of hands, fish gills, I couldn't let it out, it was dead already, it had drowned in air. It was there when I woke up, suspended in the air above me like a chalice, an evil grail and I thought, Whatever it is, part of myself or a separate creature, I killed it. It wasn't a child but it could have been one. I didn't allow it. (17.14)
Now we get the full (or, at least, fuller) details of what the vision in the water meant for the narrator. Upon seeing this creature, she realizes she doesn't actually have a child (contrary to what she's been telling us all along); she had actually had an abortion rather than carrying her pregnancy to term. Here, she seems to believe she's seeing the fetus itself or some vision thereof.
Quote #9
His hands descended, zipper sound, metal teeth on metal teeth, he was rising out of the fur husk, solid and heavy; but the cloth separated from him and I saw he was human, I didn't want him in me, sacrilege, he was one of the killers, the clay victims damaged and strewn behind him, and he hadn't seen, he didn't know about himself, his own capacity for death. (17.35)
It appears that Joe is trying to initiate sexytimes with the narrator, but all she can see is a "killer" (his "clay victims" are the mutilated ceramic pots he makes for a living) who doesn't understand his "own capacity for death." It's an odd moment that's certainly up for interpretation, but one important takeaway is that she sees death and murderers everywhere, which definitely adds to the kind of sinister, mysterious feel of the novel.
Quote #10
I'm crying finally, it's the first time, I watch myself doing it: I'm crouching down beside the lettuces, flowers finished now, gone to seed, my breath knots, my body tightens against it; the water fills my mouth, fish taste. But I'm not mourning, I'm accusing them, Why did you? They chose it, they had control over their death, they decided it was time to leave and they left, they set up this barrier. They didn't consider how I would feel, who would take care of me. I'm furious because they let it happen. (22.13)
Toward the end of the novel, the narrator confronts her grief—and the truth that now both of her parents are gone (her mother had died of an illness some time before that). She's tripped up emotionally by the finality and separation that death brings with it.