Quotes from Craig Childs

The land is not old. It only changes, becoming one thing and the next. We are the ones who ascribe age, the brevity of our lives demanding a beginning, middle and end.

There is a drop of blood in the snow before me.... The coyote... is in estrus.... spurred to let out a bit of herself, sending a message, telling everyone she was now ready, that the clock of her winter was ticking toward spring.

I rise and turn back.... leaving the rest of the world to coyotes who are now running across the mountain together, howling and yipping behind me, calling for the frozen night to come.

Water becomes filthy with desire as it gains speed into a flood. It cannot move in a straight line.... There is too much craving and energy when water moves. It wants out.

One of the more flexible words in the English language, art is defined as a human creative skill, doing something as a result of knowledge and practice. It is the mind's eye rendered in visual form.

The desire of water is scribed across the desert like graffiti, until all that is left of the desert is water.... In the scream of a flood, consummate carvings are left behind. Careful scallops are taken from the faces of canyons. This is not random work. It is artistry distilled from madness.

Water in flood means exactly what it says. It has no hypocrisy. Even as it murders, it leaves life behind and carves elegant, intricate passages into raw stone, all the while having no debate about its intention. It is the same water that will sit complacently in a hole for months or years, the same arrangement of atoms that flows gently, singing lullabies, the same that fiercely consumes children and tears the walls from titanic canyons.

She sat on the toilet and cradled her aborted baby, as if it were alive. And her eyes were like an endless well where you could not see the bottom.

She sat on the toilet and cradled the miscarriage her husband beat out of her, as if it was alive. And her eyes were like an endless well where you could not see the bottom.

This much scientists agree on: Five times in the history of the earth, most life has winked out. Five times, one species after the next disappeared, the chain collapsed, grazers died as the plants they depended on were lost, and predators disappeared shortly after, life on earth reaching as close to zero as you'd ever care to get.

Blood, for a mosquito, is a delicacy. They otherwise feed on the nectar of flowers.

Gravity, Craig," Old Pola said to me. "Now, there's a force to match tectonics. What goes up must come down.

Up high, wind purled the canopy roof. Where we were, the air didn't move, as still as the inside of a tomb. I turned on my headlamp and shone it up, illuminating detritus of sees and spores slowly falling. "We're in a snow globe," JT said.

Every living thing has the same wish to flourish again and again.

I am from a non-animist culture, nothing fancy, GDP worshippers and irrigation agrarians praying to foreign countries foe trade deals

Most animals show themselves sparingly. The grizzly bear is six to eight hundred pounds of smugness. It has no need to hide. If it were a person, it would laugh loudly in quiet restaurants, boastfully wear the wrong clothes for special occasions, and probably play hockey.

This is not wilderness for designation or for a park. Not a scenic wilderness and not one good for fishing or the viewing of wildlife. It is wilderness that gets into your nostrils, that runs with your sweat. It is the core of everything living, wilderness like molten iron.

This far north the sun was still up, although very low, riding through the mountains as if looking for something it lost on the ground.

The life of an animal lies outside of conjecture. It is far beyond the scientific papers and the campfire stories. It is as true as breath. It is important as the words of children.

There are so many of us now that we threaten to devour the world with our touching, starting with the things we adore most. At the same time, we obviously yearn for contact, and I fear what would happen if we were cut off from a distinctive, on-the-ground relationship with the past.

When you place your hand in moving water, you will feel the curves of power looping your bones, addressing your skin with logarithmic sways. Magnify that ten or twenty thousand times and you will be killed by the force. Then your body will know.... But pay attention in that moment and you will feel the intelligence of water upon you. It will tell stories of itself against your body in boils and surges and vacancies.

A trademark of something that works well, the cat body has hardly changed since its inception. Like with today's cats, their digestive systems could handle only flesh. The lesson of the cat is that if you are to become a full-fledged carnivore, you have to commit everything to it. A house cat fed vegetarian food will shrivel and die.

Like any stage of the hydrologic process, we have our own peculiarities, our organs making us nothing more than water pools or springs of bizarre shape, filled with pulsing tubes and chambers.

I grew up in motion. I have never lived outside the Southwest, yet in my childhood I rarely had the same home or lived in the same state for more than a year or two at a time. Well before adulthood I believed that all was right with the world only when I was standing at the brink of every possibility, a voyage not yet taken unraveling before me.