The novelist screws up his courage in order to invest another two or three years in another attempt to float a boat of original design upon an invented ocean.

Henry David Thoreau, who never earned much of a living or sustained a relationship with any woman that wasn't brotherly -- who lived mostly under his parents' roof . . . who advocated one day's work and six days "off" as the weekly round and was considered a bit of a fool in his hometown . . . is probably the American writer who tells us best how to live comfortably with our most constant companion, ourselves.

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

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

It would be hard to define chaos better than as a world where children decide they don't want to live.

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.

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.