Top 35 Edward Hoagland Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A mountain with a wolf on it stands a little taller...”

— Edward Hoagland

2. “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.”

— Edward Hoagland

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

— Edward Hoagland

4. “A writer’s work is to witness things.”

— Edward Hoagland

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

— Edward Hoagland

6. “There often seems to be a playfulness to wise people, as if either their equanimity has as its source this playfulness or the playfulness flows from equanimity; and they can persuade other people who are in a state of agitation to calm down and smile.”

— Edward Hoagland

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7. “There are two kinds of writers: hustlers and sanctimonious hustlers.”

— Edward Hoagland

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

— Edward Hoagland

9. “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.”

— Edward Hoagland

10. “If human nature eventually is going to take the place of nature everywhere, those of us who have been naturalists will have to transpose the faith in nature which is inherent in the profession to a faith in man-if necessary, man alone in the world.”

— Edward Hoagland

11. “To relive the relationship between owner and slave we can consider how we treat our cars and dogs – a dog exercising a somewhat similar leverage on our mercies and an automobile being comparable in value to a slave in those days.”

— Edward Hoagland

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

— Edward Hoagland

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 “Once I climbed into a mountain lion’s cage and she bounded at me and put her paw on my face, but she kept her claws withdrawn.”

— Edward Hoagland

14. “Poetry is engendered in solitude, so what better meter for it than the clip of a buckskin horse?”

— Edward Hoagland

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

— Edward Hoagland

16. “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.”

— Edward Hoagland

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

— Edward Hoagland

18. “It’s incongruous that the older we get, the more likely we are to turn in the direction of religion. Less vivid and intense ourselves, closer to the grave, we begin to conceive of ourselves as immortal.”

— Edward Hoagland

19. “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.”

— Edward Hoagland

20. “Country people tend to consider that they have a corner on righteousness and to distrust most manifestations of cleverness, while people in the city are leery of righteousness but ascribe to themselves all manner of cleverness.”

— Edward Hoagland

21. “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.”

— Edward Hoagland

22. “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.”

— Edward Hoagland

23. “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.”

— Edward Hoagland

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

— Edward Hoagland

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

— Edward Hoagland

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

— Edward Hoagland

27. “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.”

— Edward Hoagland

28. “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.”

— Edward Hoagland

29. “There were periods during my childhood when I stammered so badly I couldn’t talk at all.”

— Edward Hoagland

30. “Country people do not behave as if they think life is short; they live on the principle that it is long, and savor variations of the kind best appreciated if most days are the same.”

— Edward Hoagland

31. “Our loneliness makes us avid column readers these days.”

— Edward Hoagland

32. “Men often compete with one another until the day they die. Comradeship consists of rubbing shoulders jocularly with a competitor.”

— Edward Hoagland

33. “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.”

— Edward Hoagland

34. “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.”

— Edward Hoagland

35. “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.”

— Edward Hoagland

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

— Edward Hoagland

37. “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.”

— Edward Hoagland

38. “If a person sings quietly to himself on the street people smile with approval; but if he talks it’s not alright; they think he’s crazy. The singer is presumed to be happy and the talker unhappy...”

— Edward Hoagland