Edward Hoagland

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.

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.

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.

There often seems to be a playfulness to wise people, as if either their equanimity has as its source this playfulness or the playfulness flows from equanimity; and they can persuade other people who are in a state of agitation to calm down and smile.

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.

When I was 18 I worked with the Ringling Brothers circus, taking care of menagerie animals. I used to rather deliberately risk my life with the big cats.

The milking machines sounded tranquilizing and there was the collegiality of seventy animal spirits thriving warming the barn with cud chewing nose snuffling and sisterly mammalhood.

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

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

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.

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

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

Once I climbed into a mountain lion's cage and she bounded at me and put her paw on my face, but she kept her claws withdrawn.

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

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

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

Like a kick in the butt, the force of events wakes slumberous talents.

A writer's work is to witness things.

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.

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.