Salmon

"I'll love you, dear, I'll love you Till China and Africa meet, And the river jumps over the mountain And the salmon sing in the street,I'll love you till the ocean Is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking Like geese about the sky."

"The salmon swimming upstream to spawn may be wily in a hundred ways, but she cannot even contemplate the prospect of abandoning her reproductive project and deciding instead to live out her days studying coastal geography or trying to learn Portuguese."

"Far out beyond the surf they felt it. Beyond the reach of any canoe, half a sea away, something stirred inside them, an ancient clock of bone and blood that said, "It’s time." Silver-scaled body its own sort of compass needle spinning in the sea, the floating arrow turned toward home. From all directions they came, the sea a funnel of fish, narrowing their path as they gathered closer and closer, until their silver bodies lit up the water, redd-mates sent to sea, prodigal salmon coming home."

"The only people who wear salmon are gay men and…salmon."

"[W]hen you look at the whole thing you don't try to count the scales on the salmon, of course you don't. You see them as little silver pearls against grey and pink – isn't that right? – look at the pink of the salmon, with the bone appearing white in the centre and then grays, like the shades of mother of pearl."

"In the swirl of its pool the home-coming salmon has no intuition of anything changed."

"One pitch-dark rainy night we landed about ten o'clock at the mouth of a salmon stream when the water was phosphorescent. The salmon were running, and the myriad fins of the onrushing multitude were churning all the stream into a silvery glow, wonderfully beautiful and impressive in the ebon darkness."

"Gene Ray: Another thing, did you know your father is a fish?"

"There is a river in Macedon; and there is also moreover a river at Monmouth;... and there is salmons in poth."