“Upstream, Arkansas and Ohio have their bottomlands, too, populated by a jaundiced and hungry-looking race, prone to fevers, whose eyes gleam at the sight of stone and iron, for they know only sand and driftwood and muddy water.”

“You walk for days among trees and among stones. Rarely does the eye light on a thing, and then only when it has recognized that thing as the sign of another thing: a print in the sand indicates the tiger's passage; a marsh announces a vein of water; the hibiscus flower, the end of winter. All the rest is silent and interchangeable; trees and stones are only what they are.”

“Your cold blood cannot be worked into a fever; your veins are full of ice water; but mine are boiling, and the sight of such chillness makes them dance.”

“He smiled and bent forward, a hand on each knee, his truculence gleaming through his smile like a stone under water.”

“Look upstream. Just simply turn around; have you no will?”

“Over a third of the Newenhan population was under eighteen,which didn't make his job any easier, the hormonally challenged being terminally and all too often fatally prone to acts of stupidity.”