Our loneliness makes us avid column readers these days.

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

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.

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

Man is different from animals in that he speculates, a high-risk activity.

It's incongruous that the older we get, the more likely we are to turn in the direction of religion. Less vivid and intense ourselves, closer to the grave, we begin to conceive of ourselves as immortal.

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.