EDWARD HOAGLAND

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.

Like a kick in the butt, the force of events wakes slumberous talents.

Once I climbed into a mountain lion's cage and she bounded at me and put her paw on my face, but she kept her claws withdrawn.

Land of opportunity, land for the huddled masses where would the opportunity have been without the genocide of those Old Guard, bristling Indian tribes?

When I was 18 I worked with the Ringling Brothers circus, taking care of menagerie animals. I used to rather deliberately risk my life with the big cats.

A writer's work is to witness things.

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.

Country people do not behave as if they think life is short; they live on the principle that it is long, and savor variations of the kind best appreciated if most days are the same.

There were periods during my childhood when I stammered so badly I couldn't talk at all.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

There aren't many irritations to match the condescension which a woman metes out to a man who she believes has loved her vainly for the past umpteen years.

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

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

Poetry is engendered in solitude, so what better meter for it than the clip of a buckskin horse?

Henry David Thoreau, who never earned much of a living or sustained a relationship with any woman that wasn't brotherly -- who lived mostly under his parents' roof . . . who advocated one day's work and six days "off" as the weekly round and was considered a bit of a fool in his hometown . . . is probably the American writer who tells us best how to live comfortably with our most constant companion, ourselves.

If human nature eventually is going to take the place of nature everywhere, those of us who have been naturalists will have to transpose the faith in nature which is inherent in the profession to a faith in man-if necessary, man alone in the world.

If a person sings quietly to himself on the street people smile with approval; but if he talks it's not alright; they think he's crazy. The singer is presumed to be happy and the talker unhappy.

It's incongruous that the older we get, the more likely we are to turn in the direction of religion. Less vivid and intense ourselves, closer to the grave, we begin to conceive of ourselves as immortal.

Sophistication" is another word for that inventive mix of tolerance, resilience, and resourcefulness city people develop.

The zest for life of those unusual men and women who make a great zealous success of living is due more often in good part to the craftiness and pertinacity with which they manage to overlook the misery of others. You can watch them watch life beat the stuffing out of the faces of their friends and acquaintances, although they themselves seem to outwit the dense delays of social custom, the tedious tick-tock of bureaucratic obfuscation, accepting loss and age and change and disappointment without suffering punctures in their stomach lining.