There were periods during my childhood when I stammered so badly I couldn't talk at all..

Indeed, if "biology is chemistry with history," as somebody has said, then nature writing is biology with love..

Once I climbed into a mountain lion's cage and she bounded at me and put her paw on my face, but she kept her claws withdrawn..

It would be hard to define chaos better than as a world where children decide they don't want to live..

Man is different from animals in that he speculates, a high-risk activity..

It's incongruous that the older we get, the more likely we are to turn in the direction of religion. Less vivid and intense ourselves, closer to the ….

The zest for life of those unusual men and women who make a great zealous success of living is due more often in good part to the craftiness and pert….

To relive the relationship between owner and slave we can consider how we treat our cars and dogs - a dog exercising a somewhat similar leverage on o….

If a walker is indeed an individualist there is nowhere he can't go at dawn and not many places he can't go at noon. But just as it demeans life to l….

Suicidal thinking, if serious, can be a kind of death scare, comparable to suffering a heart attack or undergoing a cancer operation. One survives su….

In order to really enjoy a dog, one doesn't merely try to train him to be semi-human. The point of it is to open oneself to the possibility of becomi….

Animals used to provide a lowlife way to kill and get away with it, as they do still, but, more intriguingly, for some people they are an aperture th….

If human nature eventually is going to take the place of nature everywhere, those of us who have been naturalists will have to transpose the faith in….

There aren't many irritations to match the condescension which a woman metes out to a man who she believes has loved her vainly for the past umpteen ….

Henry David Thoreau, who never earned much of a living or sustained a relationship with any woman that wasn't brotherly -- who lived mostly under his….

If two people are in love they can sleep on the blade of a knife..

Silence is exhilarating at first - as noise is - but there is a sweetness to silence outlasting exhilaration, akin to the sweetness of listening and ….

There are two kinds of writers: hustlers and sanctimonious hustlers..

To live is to see, and traveling sometimes speeds up the process..

True solitude is a din of birdsong, seething leaves, whirling colors, or a clamor of tracks in the snow..

A mountain with a wolf on it stands a little taller..