76 Quotes by Edward Hoagland

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.

If two people are in love they can sleep on the blade of a knife.

Animals used to provide a lowlife way to kill and get away with it, as they do still, but, more intriguingly, for some people they are an aperture through which wounds drain. The scapegoat of olden times, driven off for the bystanders sins, has become a tender thing, a running injury. There, running away is me: hurt it and you are hurting me.

Many divorces are not really the result of irreparable injury but involve, instead, a desire on the part of the man or woman to shatter the setup, start out from scratch alone, and make life work for them all over again. They want the risk of disaster, want to touch bottom, see where bottom is, and, coming up, to breathe the air with relief and relish again.

A Land of Ghosts' is a sizzling pilgrimage, haunted by trenchant foreboding that this topmost cream of creation will soon be destroyed.

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.

A mountain with a wolf on it stands a little taller...

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

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.