A writer's work is to witness things..

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….

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

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….

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

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

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….

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

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

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….

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

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..

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….

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

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 ….

Once I climbed into a mountain lion's cage and she bounded at me and put her paw on my face, but she kept her claws withdrawn..

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….

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 ….

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