I find it satisfying and intellectually stimulating to work with the intensity, brevity, balance and word play of the short story.
It was not Quoyle’s chin she hated, but his cringing hesitancy, as though he waited for her anger, expected her to make him suffer.
What could he say?
What he had was what he pretended.
The armor of indifference in which he protected his marriage was frail... the newspaper rustling with each heave of his chest, tears running down into his ears.
The great bay with its powerful tides, its estuaries and islands, its freshwater rivers and the nurturing ocean supplied everything...
The fog tore apart, light charged the sea like blue neon.
You may think that the equation is ‘boat and water.’ It’s not. It’s ‘money and boat.’ The water is not really necessary. That’s why you see so many boats in backyards.
He is one of those who cannot be other than lonely. He was born to it.
Captain James Duke, in his early fifties, was complicated, dark-haired, and somewhat handsome. He took a hard-headed and hard-handed stance to disguise an inner recognition of worthlessness. Quixotic, he swung from morbid self-pity to rigid authority over his crews and himself. The future flickered before him as a likely series of disappointments.
He had stanched the blood, which was everywhere, all over both of them, with his shirtsleeve, but the stanching hadn’t held, because Ennis had suddenly swung from the deck and laid the ministering angel out in the wild columbine, wings folded.
He put away his identification as Mi’kmaq and became a hybrid person.
What could not happen began to happen.
In the arena everything was real because none of it was real except the chance to get dead. The charged bolt came, he thought, because he wasn’t. All around him wild things were falling to the earth.
No man on earth could be deterred from taking an unknown shortcut.
Knew they’d be lost forever if they went, for even the few that came back were altered in temper as a knife reclaimed from the ashes of a house fire.
He hated the American clear-cut despoliation, the insane wastage of sound valuable wood, the destruction of the soil, the gullying and erosion, the ruin of the forest world with no thought for the future.
No, he thought, they got him with the tire iron.
Wetlands are actually unsung heroes. They nurture young fish, provide refuge to birds, bats, bugs, and sometimes to big mammals like panthers and bears. Mangroves, for instance, are trees and shrubs that inhabit coastal swamps, and they form peat that is home to clams, snails, crabs, and shrimp, and filter pollution out of the water. Their “interlaced roots protect tiny fish from ravenous jaws of larger fish, and even manatees and dolphins take refuge there.
One thing about this group, thought Felix, they really like talking about trees.
Indonesia’s richly complex wooded peatlands where entrepreneurs log, burn and plow to make palm oil plantations are one of the saddest examples of great biological loss. In shops and stores I read labels and when I find bars of soap made with palm oil I get a mental image of a ravaged forest. I do not buy that soap.