David Douglas Quotes

As I walked in the woods to see the birds and squirrels, so I walked in the village to see the men and boys; instead of the wind among the pines I heard the carts rattle. In one direction from my house there was a colony of muskrats in the river meadows; under the grove of elms and buttonwoods in the other horizon was a village of busy men, as curious to me as if they had been prarie-dogs, each sitting at the mouth of its burrow, or running over to a neighbor's to gossip. I went there frequently to observe their habits.

I like sometimes to take rank hold on life and spend my day more as the animals do. Perhaps I have owed to this employment and tohunting, when quite young, my closest acquaintance with Nature. They early introduce us to and detain us in scenery with which otherwise, at that age, we should have little acquaintance.

Maybe the hardest lesson is the one I have to learn over and over again, that each story is its own animal, that every story I write is going to come only with difficulty.

I work very hard on finding good characters who can explain things to me, and I use them to help tell the story. I organize my pieces not just around people but around animals and plants, energy flows, the path that carbon takes through the food system.

I sometimes lose interest in the characters and get much more interested in the trees and animals.

There is a story that you have to tell within a certain amount of time, and you can only show so much of the character. So as much as the script is born from the source material, there are certain limitations.

Animals give me more pleasure through the viewfinder of a camera than they ever did in the crosshairs of a gunsight.

Pray look upon the plants and birds, the ants, spiders, and bees, and you will see them all exerting their nature, and busy in their station. Pray, shall not a man act like a man?

I saw a muskrat come out of a hole in the ice ... While I am looking at him, I am thinking what he is thinking of me. He is a different sort of man, that's all.

Follow that porcupine!

Silently the animal catches our glance. The animal looks at us, and whether we look away (from the animal, our plate, our concern, ourselves) or not, we are exposed. Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something

Stop trying to write sentences and start trying to write stories.

I set myself up for a lot of trouble by wanting to tell a story that is fairly earnest and emotional and expressive, but to do it in the most subtle, realistic way.

Animals fascinate me because you can find a force, an energy, a fear that also exists in sex.

Why should a lobster be any more ridiculous than a dog? ... or a cat, or a gazelle, or a lion, or any other animal one chooses to take for a walk? I have a liking for lobsters. They are peaceful, serious creatures. ... Goethe had an aversion to dogs, and he wasn't mad. They know the secrets of the sea, they don't bark.

I'm a novelist, I'm not an activist. I'm not a non-fiction writer, I'm not a journalist. I'm not a foodie, I'm not even really an animal person, or an environmentalist. I did the best I could with this, but it's not who I am.

For me it is really important to have a story with blood in the veins, there are bad tempers and good tempers.

That's the problem with them fables, they're putting animals together that wouldn't meet. I don't know where a scorpion is knockin' around with a frog.

So in the drafting process, whenever I would discover something about what my character wanted or didn't want, I immediately just wanted my character to admit to that so I could get to the next, more interesting level in the story.

A story can take you through a whole process of searching, seeking, confronting, through conflicts, and then to a resolution. As the storyteller and the listener, we go through a story together.

You understand that the piggies are animals, and you no more condemn them for murdering Libo and Pipo than you condemn a cabra for shewing up capim." That's right," said Miro. Ender smiled. "And that's why you'll never learn anything from them. Because you think of them as animals.

The purpose of life is to stay alive. Watch any animal in nature--all it tries to do is stay alive. It doesn't care about beliefs or philosophy. Whenever any animal's behavior puts it out of touch with the realities of its existence, it becomes exinct.

Psychology, as the behaviorist views it, is a purely objective, experimental branch of natural science which needs introspection as little as do the sciences of chemistry and physics.... The position is taken here that the behavior of man and the behavior of animals must be considered in the same plane.

Animal lovers often tend to be misanthropes or loners, and so they transfer their affection to the creature in their control.

We're all animals, that we all respond to the same stimuli. If you want to motivate somebody not to have premarital sex, or motivate black bears not to go diving into dumpsters, first you have to think about why they do it. Telling them to stop isn't going to help. There has to be some incentive for them to alter their behavior.