It’s better to stand by someone’s side than by yourself.
There is such a thing as anesthesia of pain, engendered by pain too exquisite to be borne.
As one grows weaker one is less susceptible to suffering. There is less hurt because there is less to hurt.
He was always striving to attain it. The life that was so swiftly expanding within him, urged him continually toward the wall of light. The life that was within him knew that it was the one way out, the way he was predestined to tread.
Of her own experience she had no memory of the thing happening; but in her instinct, which was the experience of all mothers of wolves, there lurked a memory of fathers that had eaten their new-born and helpless progeny.
She was thrilling to a desire that urged her to go forward, to be in closer to that fire, to be squabbling with the dogs, and to be avoiding and dodging the stumbling feet of men.
He was a silent fury who no torment could tame.
They were not half living, or quarter living. They were simply so many bags of bones in which sparks of life fluttered faintly.
But I am I. And I won’t subordinate my taste to the unanimous judgment of mankind.
My mistake was in ever opening the books.
He was not immoral, but merely unmoral.
Man rarely places a proper valuation upon his womankind, at least not until deprived of them.
For the pride of trace and trail was his, and sick unto death, he could not bear that another dog should do his work.
He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time.
Thus it was that in obedience to the law laid down by his mother, and in obedience to the law of that unknown and nameless thing, fear, he kept away from the mouth of the cave.
It was the worst hurt he had ever known.
Out of this pack-persecution he learned two important things: how to take care of himself in a mass-fight against him; and how, on a single dog, to inflict the greatest amount of damage in the briefest space of time.
His bondage had softened him. Irresponsibility had weakened him. He had forgotten how to shift for himself. The night yawned about him.
White Fang knew the law well: to oppress the weak and obey the strong.
But under it all they were men, penetrating the land of desolation and mockery and silence, puny adventurers bent on colossal adventure, pitting themselves against the might of a world as remote and alien and pulseless as the abysses of space.