Pilgrim, briefly

The high creek doesn't look like our creek. Our creek splashes transparently over a jumble of rocks; the high creek obliterates everything in flat opacity. It looks like somebody else's creek that has usurped or eaten our creek and is roving frantically to escape, big and ugly, like a blacksnake caught in a kitchen drawer. [151]

Fecundity is anathema only in the animal. "Acres and acres of rats" has a suitably chilling ring to it that is decidedly lacking if I say, instead, "acres and acres of tulips." [167]

Learning to stalk muskrats took me several years. [192]

Tulips had cast their leaves on my path, flat and bright as doubloons. I passed under a sugar maple that stunned me by its elegant unself-consciousness: it was as if a man on fire were to continue calmly sipping tea. [249]

A chipmunk was streaking around with the usual calamitous air. When he saw me he stood to investigate, tucking his front legs tightly against his breast, so that only his paws were visible, and he looked like a supplicant modestly holding his hat. [251]

A monarch in flight looks like an autumn leaf with a will, vitalized and cast upon the air from which it seems to suck some thin sugar of energy, some leaf-life or sap. [257]

Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Harper Perennial, 1998. ISBN: 0060953020.