A writer's work is to witness things.

Animals are stylized characters in a kind of old saga - stylized because even the most acute of them have little leeway as they play out their parts.

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.

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.

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.

To live is to see, and traveling sometimes speeds up the process.