How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
I didn't want there to be wars and death, I wanted them not to exist; only rabbits with their coloured egg houses, sun and moon orderly above the flat earth, summer always, I wanted everyone to be happy. But his pictures were more accurate, the weapons, the disintegrating soldiers: he was a realist, that protected him. He almost drowned once but he would never allow that to happen again, by the time he left he was ready. (15.41)
Here, the narrator is thinking about her brother, who apparently had a bit of a violent streak. While the narrator was drawing pictures of bunnies and the moon, her brother was drawing soldiers and weapons—in short, she avoided thinking about or representing death, and he (having already confronted death as a child in a near-drowning accident) embraced it.
Quote #5
The trouble some people have being German, I thought, I have being human. In a way it was stupid to be more disturbed by a dead bird than by those other things, the wars and riots and the massacres in the newspapers. But for the wars and riots there was always an explanation, people wrote books about them saying why they happened: the death of the heron was causeless, undiluted. (15.38)
Coming across a dead heron in the woods really upsets the narrator—she seems more traumatized by the needless brutality involved in killing that bird than she is by anything else (including her father's death). She suggests, of course, that she can deal with death when there's a point to it, but the notion of just killing something because really gets her upset.
Quote #6
Whether it died willingly, consented, whether Christ died willingly, anything that suffers and dies instead of us is Christ; if they didn't kill birds and fish they would have killed us. The animals die that we may live, they are substitute people, hunters in the fall killing the deer, that is Christ also. (17.1)
Now the narrator is musing that the human instinct to kill other humans is somehow sublimated or satisfied by killing animals. She attributes this instinct to the "Americans" who supposedly killed the heron.