Brian Kimberling > Quotes

“A list of birds seen on a given day is also a form of prayer, a thanksgiving for being alive at a certain time and place. Posting that list online is a 21st-century form of a votive offering.”
― Brian Kimberling, Snapper

“From remote and sparsely populated Vermont, Indiana seemed hopeless; a collection of turtle-shooting subliterates--people opposed to evolution, pluralism, and poetry.

And yet. Those leaves.”
― Brian Kimberling, Snapper

“A proper Indiana twister looks something like God got fed up with his spinach. God in this instance is about six years old . . When the funnel cloud snaps from sky to earth, God has just turned sixteen and that is his middle finger.”
― Brian kimberling.

“It takes no skill to find a bald eagle. You look for flat rabbits on country roads. Wait a while and the national emblem will appear, menace anything that got there first, and plunge his majestic head deep in a mass of entrails. Alternatively, you can follow some industrious hawk through swamp or bottomland forest until he dispatches a squirrel; an eagle is likely to descend, savage the smaller bird, and steal his prize. The eagle can hunt, of course; he just prefers not to. Benjamin Franklin called him a bird of bad moral character. It takes no skill to find the nest, either. Look for a shipwreck in a tree, layered in feces . . . The likeliest impediment to (the eagles’) reproductive success was a human observer bungling around twice a day, but their welfare was almost incidental anyway. The point was for patriotic human hearts to swell with pride on outdoor weekends, and convincing replicas would have sufficed; the compulsive monitoring was not good husbandry, just an expression of national guilt. I did what I was paid for. Privately I sided with the furred and feathered residents of the area who must have wondered why humans were loosing winged hyenas in their midst . . . They’re glorified vultures. An apex predator that never hunts. Absurd.”
― Brian Kimberling, Snapper

“It was only when I returned that I viewed Indiana through such a jaundiced eye. While there I tried desperately to gather the whole state around me and make it cohere. I don't mean to say that I enjoyed living there, either; rather, the state itself was my own lifelong imbroglio.”
― Brian Kimberling, Snapper

“Dismemberment, even posthumous, is obscene.”
― Brian Kimberling, Snapper

“She said not to worry-- that she had done so many things she regretted and perhaps we should both agree that we had sprung fully formed from the head of Zeus in about the year 2000”
― Brian Kimberling

“Somewhere in that ancient brain it knows that you are an idiot with a stick, to be endured, and that tomorrow there will be fish to catch. It can't, like other turtles, withdraw into its shell, but, serious and adult, it will not rise to your childish taunts.”
― Brian Kimberling, Snapper

“Well, that's one afternoon shot to hell,' I said. 'No,' said Shane. 'Other people are watching TV.”
― Brian Kimberling, Snapper

“She was not always honest, but she was never rude. "I've only been in his house once. He has a sofa and two bird books. That’s all. I feel sorry for him." The last man Lola felt sorry for proposed to her.”
― Brian Kimberling