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

Black bears, though, are not fearsome. I encountered one on the road to my house in Vermont, alone at night. I picked up two stones just in case, but I wasn't afraid of him. I felt a hunter's exhilaration and a brotherly feeling.

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

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.

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

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

The question of whether it's God's green earth is not at center stage, except in the sense that if so, one is reminded with some regularity that He may be dying.