Men greet each other with a sock on the arm, women with a hug, and the hug wears better in the long run.

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

Once I climbed into a mountain lion's cage and she bounded at me and put her paw on my face, but she kept her claws withdrawn.

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

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.

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

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.