Edward Hoagland Quotes

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

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.

Sophistication is another word for that inventive mix of tolerance, resilience, and resourcefulness city people develop.

There were periods during my childhood when I stammered so badly I couldn't talk at all.

We New Yorkers see more death and violence than most soldiers do, grow a thick chitin on our backs, grimace like a rat and learn to do a disappearing act. Long ago we outgrew the need to be blowhards about our masculinity; we leave that to the Alaskans and Texans, who have more time for it.

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

Did you have to understand life to plunge in? Even kindness, when he encountered it, was a riddle half the time. If you walked into a door and bloodied your nose, it was one thing, but empathy for handicaps had never been his thing when he himself had none. Empathy had been for people of good cheer.

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.

Once I climbed into a mountain lion's cage and she bounded at me and put her paw on my face, but she kept her claws withdrawn.

The whistling dawn, the sussurration of the leaves, a honking goose, and then a sentimental confab at the Solid Rock Gospel Church with a wounded soul who poured his heart out to Press precisely because he was blind and therefore harmless. Since these individuals had no money, he couldn't give them financial advice, just wholehearted sympathy. As at the commune, a toddler might scramble into his lap, and while he petted the child its mother held a cookie to its mouth and another one to his to bite and chew.
A world worth living in and for.

What did you give your kids, besides a lottery of genes? A stance--that mix of bluff and confidence, backbone and wussiness that passes for personality or character. One talks less about ethics after third grade. Don't steal candy or hit other children, if they hadn't learned the costs of violence on their own.

No birdcall is the musical equal of a clarinet blown with panache.

Men greet each other with a sock on the arm, women with a hug, and the hug wears better in the long run.

Man is different from animals in that he speculates, a high-risk activity.

He couldn't work, as such, but needed to flex himself somehow in ways that felt like work, he thought. Lacking credentials and sight he could not teach, for example. Even reading a cold-call script would be out, although he'd heard of a resourceful blind man who went to the social security office and suggested, "Give me either a job or just my damned check," and received the former, skillfully handling mediation assignments.

Many people have believed that they were Chosen, but none more baldly than the Texans.

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.

Summer is when we believe, all of a sudden, that if we just walked out the back door and kept on going long enough and far enough we would reach the Rocky Mountains.

We have in America "The Big Two-Hearted River" tradition: taking your wounds to the wilderness for a cure, a conversation, a rest, whatever. And as is in the Hemingway story, if your wounds aren't too bad, it works. But this isn't Michigan (or Faulkner's Big Woods in Mississippi for that matter). This is Alaska.

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.

There is a time of life somewhere between the sullen fugues of adolescence and the retrenchments of middle age when human nature becomes so absolutely absorbing one wants to be in the city constantly, even at the height of summer.

There are two kinds of writers: hustlers and sanctimonious hustlers.

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.

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.

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.

The zest for life of those unusual men and women who make a great zealous success of living is due more often in good part to the craftiness and pertinacity with which they manage to overlook the misery of others. You can watch them watch life beat the stuffing out of the faces of their friends and acquaintances, although they themselves seem to outwit the dense delays of social custom, the tedious tick-tock of bureaucratic obfuscation, accepting loss and age and change and disappointment without suffering punctures in their stomach lining.

True solitude is a din of birdsong, seething leaves, whirling colors, or a clamor of tracks in the snow.

In order to really enjoy a dog, one doesn't merely try to train him to be semi-human. The point of it is to open oneself to the possibility of becoming partly a dog.

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.

If a walker is indeed an individualist there is nowhere he can't go at dawn and not many places he can't go at noon. But just as it demeans life to live alongside a great river you can no longer swim in or drink from, to be crowded into safer areas and hours takes much of the gloss off walking - one sport you shouldn't have to reserve a time and a court for.

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

Many divorces are not really the result of irreparable injury but involve, instead, a desire on the part of the man or woman to shatter the setup, start out from scratch alone, and make life work for them all over again. They want the risk of disaster, want to touch bottom, see where bottom is, and, coming up, to breathe the air with relief and relish again.

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

Our loneliness makes us avid column readers these days.

A writer's work is to witness things.

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.

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.

Suicidal thinking, if serious, can be a kind of death scare, comparable to suffering a heart attack or undergoing a cancer operation. One survives such a phase both warier and chastened. When-ten years ago-I emerged from a bad dip into suicidal speculation, I felt utterly exhausted and yet quite fearless of ordinary dangers, vastly afraid of myself but much less scared of extraneous eventualities.

The question of whether it's God's green earth is not at center stage, except in the sense that if so, one is reminded with some regularity that He may be dying.