Quotes from Stephen J. Bodio

I quickly learned that people in this mountainous region aren't early risers, preferring for the sun to take the chill off the landscape before doing much stirring around.

Eagles were "not the prettiest birds in the world" and were "sky sloths";

Apparently it's okay for eagles to hunt. But it's not okay for people to enjoy it.

one octogenarian "grandfather" who still used the rifle with which he had killed the Russians who tried to stop him at the border in the thirties.

I'm like, wait a minute, wait a minute! I mean, I just want to know one thing: How do you teach them not to eat your kids?

What does writing let you do that you couldn't do otherwise?" I answered, quickly, that it let me live the life I loved and to do odd things—falconry, travel, animal keeping. And, I added, "sometimes get paid for them.

General sporting magazines, scrabbling madly for dollars in a declining market, had become tools of market research, which again and again told editors to give readers more of what they already had.

Mongolia, which he described as "Montana in the seventeenth century.

all clues, ideally, should be met with delight and detachment, rather than euphoria or, worse, disdain and despair.

orders the roof of the shelter to be thrown open and so sees the cranes, he bids his attendants fetch such gerfalcons take the cranes in full view while the Great Khan remains all the while on his couch. And this affords him great sport and recreation.

I sometimes threw books without indexes to the floor.

QUERENCIA: The word doesn't translate. It is used in Spanish to designate that mysterious little area in the bullring that catches the fancy of the fighting bull when he charges in. He imagines it his sanctuary: when parked there, he supposes he cannot be hurt. . . . So it is, borrowing the term, that one can speak of one's "querencia" to mean that little, unspecified area in life's arena where one feels safe, serene.