“No matter how close we are to another person, few human relationships are as free from strife, disagreement, and frustration as is the relationship you have with a good dog. Few human beings give o...”

“In spite of where we were, how we had gotten here and why we had come, I felt that at this moment of our lives, this place was exactly where we belonged. We were not drifting but rising, rising tow...”

“When we make our own misery we sometimes cling to it even when we want so bad to change, because misery is something we know. The misery is comfortable.”

“Change isn't easy. Changing the way you live means changing the way you think, means changing what you believe about life. That's hard.”

“He would pray...for everyone who knew pain, which meant everyone who wore a human face.”

“For a long time things were so bad. Very bad. Dark even when there was light.The only thing that kept the dark back was the Forever Shiny Thing that was her secret...It is a word...the word hangs o...”

“Hermy, when she was not otter-hunting, could be very sarcastic, and he had a clear month of Hermy in front of him, without any otter-hunting, which, so she had informed him, was not possible in Aug...”

“They dived into the ocean of shadow and smog, adding to it with the fumes of their own aircraft. The goggles were useless now, but Jacob kept them on, in case there might be some break in the murky...”

“(Quoting her friend Tom Black on an amateur hunter's injury:)"Lion, rifles -- and stupidity.”

“No matter how exotic or seemingly different another man is, there's always some reflection of self in another male.”

“If anything has made men more effeminate in the past half-century, it's been the running feminist critique of masculinity.”

“The natural gods of men are other men, mythic or real, who embody manhood in men's eyes.”