There are two kinds of writers: hustlers and sanctimonious hustlers.

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

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.

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

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.

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

To relive the relationship between owner and slave we can consider how we treat our cars and dogs - a dog exercising a somewhat similar leverage on our mercies and an automobile being comparable in value to a slave in those days