Edward Hoagland Quotes

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 becoming partly a dog.

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 years.

Men often compete with one another until the day they die. Comradeship consists of rubbing shoulders jocularly with a competitor.

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

The question of whether it's God's green earth is not at center stage, except in the sense that if so, one is reminded with some regularity that He may be dying.

Animals are stylized characters in a kind of old saga - stylized because even the most acute of them have little leeway as they play out their parts.

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

Men greet each other with a sock on the arm, women with a hug, and the hug wears better in the long run.

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

Summer is when we believe, all of a sudden, that if we just walked out the back door and kept on going long enough and far enough we would reach the Rocky Mountains.

Land of opportunity, land for the huddled masses where would the opportunity have been without the genocide of those Old Guard, bristling Indian tribes?

Many people have believed that they were Chosen, but none more baldly than the Texans.

Sophistication" is another word for that inventive mix of tolerance, resilience, and resourcefulness city people develop.

City people try to buy time as a rule, when they can, whereas country people are prepared to kill time, although both try to cherish in their mind's eye the notion of a better life ahead.

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

Country people do not behave as if they think life is short; they live on the principle that it is long, and savor variations of the kind best appreciated if most days are the same.

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

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

No birdcall is the musical equal of a clarinet blown with panache.

The novelist screws up his courage in order to invest another two or three years in another attempt to float a boat of original design upon an invented ocean.

A writer's work is to witness things.

Poetry is engendered in solitude, so what better meter for it than the clip of a buckskin horse?

Our loneliness makes us avid column readers these days.

If a person sings quietly to himself on the street people smile with approval; but if he talks it's not alright; they think he's crazy. The singer is presumed to be happy and the talker unhappy.

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

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.

Don't be afraid of the dark." She tousled his hair tolerantly. "I've never known a man who wasn't scared of more things than I was.

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