Quotes from James Oliver Curwood

In every man's heart there is a devil, but we do not know the man as bad until the devil is roused.

The greatest thrill is not to kill but to let live.

To steal book seems like stealing the soul out of someone.

He loved life. He loved the stars silently glowing down at him tonight. He loved even the gray, lifeless rock, which recalled to his imaginative genius the terrific and interesting life that had once existed--he loved the ghostly majesty of the grave-like pinnacle that rose above him, and beyond that he loved all the world. But most of all, more than his own life or all that a thousand lives might hold for him, he loved the violet-eyed girl.

one's capacity for happiness depends largely on how deeply one has suffered.

One's hard luck and misfortune form the measuring stick for future good luck and fortune.

What a splendid liar! she breathed softly. Don't you believe in God? Kent winced. In a large, embracing sense, yes, he said. I believe in Him, for instance, as revealed to our senses in all that living, growing glory you see out there through the window Nature and I have become pretty good pals, and you see I've sort of built up a mother goddess to worship instead of a he-god. Sacrilege, maybe, but it's a great comfort at times. But you didn't come to talk religion?

Of all the odors of a camp, the smell of bacon reaches farthest in the forest. It needs no wind. It drifts on its own wings. On a still night a fox will sniff it a mile away—twice that far if the air is moving in the right direction. It was this smell of bacon that came to Baree where he lay in his hollow on top of the beaver dam.

What unsolved mysteries, what unwritten tragedies, what romance, what treasure of gold that vast North must hold! For a thousand, perhaps a million centuries, it had lain thus undisturbed in the embrace of nature; few white men had broken its solitudes, and the wild things still lived there as they had lived in the winters of ages and ages ago.

So they turned into the north, not knowing that nature had already schemed that they four – the dog, wolf, otter and beaver – should soon be engaged in one of those merciless struggles of the wild which keep animal life down to the survival of the fittest, and whose tragic histories are kept secret under the stars and the moon and the wind that tell no tales.