It is impossible to be among the woods animals on their own ground without a feeling of expanding one's own world, as when any foreign country is visited.

But to make the intangible tangible, to pick the emotion out of the air and make it true for others, is both the blessing and the curse of the writer, for the thing between book covers is never as beautiful as the thing he imagined.

Fear is the most easily taught of all lessons, and the fight against terror, real or imagined, is perhaps the history of man's mind.

Who owns Cross Creek? The red-birds, I think, more than I, for they will have their nests even in the face of delinquent mortgages..It seems to me that the earth may be borrowed, but not bought. It may be used, but not owned. It gives itself in response to love and tending, offers its sesonal flowering and fruiting. But we are tenants and not possessors, lovers, and not masters. Cross Creek belongs to the wind and the rain, to the sun and the seasons, to the cosmic secrecy of seed, and beyond all, to time..."

the inferred is always more effective than the obvious.

Personal publicity is apt to be dangerous to any writer's integrity; for the moment he begins to fancy himself as quite a person, a taint creeps into his work.

You kin tame a bear. You kin tame a wild-cat and you kin tame a panther. ... You kin tame arything, son, excusin' the human tongue.