Suicidal thinking, if serious, can be a kind of death scare, comparable to suffering a heart attack or undergoing a cancer operation. One survives such a phase both warier and chastened. When-ten years ago-I emerged from a bad dip into suicidal speculation, I felt utterly exhausted and yet quite fearless of ordinary dangers, vastly afraid of myself but much less scared of extraneous eventualities.

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

Indeed, if "biology is chemistry with history," as somebody has said, then nature writing is biology with love.

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

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.

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

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.