How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
And nature is a fan dancer born with a fan; you can wrestle her down, throw her on the stage and grapple with her for the fan with all your might, but it will never quit her grip. She comes that way; the fan is attached. (11.63)
Dillard's talking about the impossibility of predicting what an individual will do, even if you can predict the behavior of a group—this is true of both muskrats and subatomic particles. There's only so much we can know about nature, so ultimately, it's beautiful and inscrutable and improbable.
Quote #8
[…] the physical world as we understand it now is more like the touch-and-go creek world I see than it is like the abiding world of which the mountains seem to speak. (11.67)
If you judge the world by the mountains, it never seems to move. If you judge it by the creeks, though, it never seems to stop.
Quote #9
A little blood from the wrists and throat is the price I would willingly pay for that pressure of clacking weights on my shoulders, for the scent of deserts, groundfire in my ears – for being so in the clustering thick of things, rapt and enwrapped in the rising and falling real world. (12.50)
Yeah, she's talking about being eaten by grasshoppers here, which is a thing that can happen. We're going to pretend we didn't know that. We invite you to join us in our denial.