Quotes from Edward Hoagland

Hard-bitten had a double meaning: bitten hard by life, like her, or clamping meanly down on other people. But, as though belying his thoughts, she said, "I hope your days are good." "If only. My eyes, you know, are like Swiss cheese, the doctor says. I see through the holes.

She--the unnamed lady--simply drew his hands to the Paleolithic places men always have grown tumid from feeling, like the outward cradle of the hips within which a fetus will reside and her breasts that will nourish it, once born.

The sexual license prevalent among {the} Sixties generation was deplorable, but no more so than predatory Capitalism, with cruel slums alongsideabsurd affluence: affluence which paid for...depictions of the Holy Family as a form of expiation. Love was the basis for what he believed. Promiscuity certainly violated that polestar, yet caring for others, even in "fooling around"--which was not to justify it--topped dog-eat-dog Capitalism.

As a customer's man, his best brokerage work was securing the old age of his clients: time for them to do what they wished.

Silence is exhilarating at first - as noise is - but there is a sweetness to silence outlasting exhilaration, akin to the sweetness of listening and the velvet of sleep

Men were so violent, she complained. Why were men so violent? You had to be careful as a woman. You could get somebody's nose broken if you griped that they had pinched you or even looked at you funny. And of course that wasn't what you wanted; you just wanted to be left alone. Also, you knew that the mean son of a bitch that broke the poor jerk's nose was just getting his rocks off--didn't care about you personally.

God is so cruel," she murmured reflectively, as though answering him. "Yes," he admitted, from the vantage point of going blind. "Though maybe people are kinder if He made them that way." "You've run with a different crowd. Rich people are nicer to rich people." "Sure. Yes. That's why I've washed up here. Rich people couldn't have been nicer to me.

Don't be afraid of the dark." She tousled his hair tolerantly. "I've never known a man who wasn't scared of more things than I was.

The milking machines sounded tranquilizing, and there was the collegiality of seventy animal spirits thriving, warming the barn with cud-chewing, nose-snuffling, and sisterly mammalhood.

A mountain with a wolf on it stands a little taller.

Often eating took considerable extra time, since he could hardly see his food, groping with a fork or spoon, enforcedly omnivorous. "Blind men wear spotted pants," Dorothy teased, telling him to wash his...

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.

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.

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

To live is to see, and traveling sometimes speeds up the process.

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

Indeed, if "biology is chemistry with history," as somebody has said, then nature writing is biology with love.

It would be hard to define chaos better than as a world where children decide they don't want to live.

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.

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.

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.

The novelist screws up his courage in order to invest another two or three years in another attempt to float a boat of original design upon an invented ocean.

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.