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.

There is a time of life somewhere between the sullen fugues of adolescence and the retrenchments of middle age when human nature becomes so absolutely absorbing one wants to be in the city constantly, even at the height of summer.

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.

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

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.