Edward Hoagland Quotes & Sayings

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. — Edward Hoagland

Poetry is engendered in solitude, so what better meter for it than the clip of a buckskin horse? — Edward Hoagland

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. — Edward Hoagland

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

Men often compete with one another until the day they die. Comradeship consists of rubbing shoulders jocularly with a competitor. — Edward Hoagland

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. — Edward Hoagland

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. — Edward Hoagland

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

Once I climbed into a mountain lion's cage and she bounded at me and put her paw on my face, but she kept her claws withdrawn.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

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

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

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

Like a kick in the butt, the force of events wakes slumberous talents. — Edward Hoagland

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

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

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. — Edward Hoagland

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... — Edward Hoagland

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

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. — Edward Hoagland

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

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

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

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. — Edward Hoagland

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

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

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

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

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. — Edward Hoagland

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

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

A mountain with a wolf on it stands a little taller ... — Edward Hoagland

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. — Edward Hoagland

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. — Edward Hoagland

There are two kinds of writers: hustlers and sanctimonious hustlers. — Edward Hoagland

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

Henry David Thoreau, who never earned much of a living or sustained a relationship with any woman that wasn't brotherly
who lived mostly under his parents' roof ... who advocated one day's work and six days "off" as the weekly round and was considered a bit of a fool in his hometown ... is probably the American writer who tells us best how to live comfortably with our most constant companion, ourselves. — Edward Hoagland

I'd like a break. I'm forty-six, so the undertow is beginning to get to me."
"Then what are you good for?" she asked, in a kind tone.
"Oh, a man around the house has his uses. A dildo; an ear to talk to; two arms around you; a voice from the next room when you're lonesome."
"I have a dog to talk to."
"That might be a deal killer. — Edward Hoagland

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. — Edward Hoagland

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. — 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. — Edward Hoagland

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

A writer's work is to witness things. — Edward Hoagland

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

Our loneliness makes us avid column readers these days. — Edward Hoagland

Animals used to provide a lowlife way to kill and get away with it, as they do still, but, more intriguingly, for some people they are an aperture through which wounds drain. The scapegoat of olden times, driven off for the bystanders sins, has become a tender thing, a running injury. There, running away is me: hurt it and you are hurting me. — Edward Hoagland

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

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

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

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

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. — Edward Hoagland

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. — Edward Hoagland

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

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

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. — Edward Hoagland

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

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

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

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

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

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