Indeed, if “biology is chemistry with history,” as somebody has said, then nature writing is biology with love.
Black bears, though, are not fearsome. I encountered one on the road to my house in Vermont, alone at night. I picked up two stones just in case, but I wasn’t afraid of him. I felt a hunter’s exhilaration and a brotherly feeling.
There were periods during my childhood when I stammered so badly I couldn’t talk at all.
Once I climbed into a mountain lion’s cage and she bounded at me and put her paw on my face, but she kept her claws withdrawn.
A writer’s work is to witness things.
There are two kinds of writers: hustlers and sanctimonious hustlers.
We New Yorkers see more death and violence than most soldiers do, grow a thick chitin on our backs, grimace like a rat and learn to do a disappearing act. Long ago we outgrew the need to be blowhards about our masculinity; we leave that to the Alaskans and Texans, who have more time for it.
Poetry is engendered in solitude, so what better meter for it than the clip of a buckskin horse?
Country people tend to consider that they have a corner on righteousness and to distrust most manifestations of cleverness, while people in the city are leery of righteousness but ascribe to themselves all manner of cleverness.
To live is to see, and traveling sometimes speeds up the process.
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 our mercies and an automobile being comparable in value to a slave in those days.
True solitude is a din of birdsong, seething leaves, whirling colors, or a clamor of tracks in the snow.
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.
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 nature which is inherent in the profession to a faith in man-if necessary, man alone in the world.
Our loneliness makes us avid column readers these days.
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.
It would be hard to define chaos better than as a world where children decide they don’t want to live.
Did you have to understand life to plunge in? Even kindness, when he encountered it, was a riddle half the time. If you walked into a door and bloodied your nose, it was one thing, but empathy for handicaps had never been his thing when he himself had none. Empathy had been for people of good cheer.
She – the unnamed lady – simply drew his hands to the Paleolithic places men always have grown tumid from feeling, like the outward cradle of the hips within which a fetus will reside and her breasts that will nourish it, once born.