Edward Hoagland Quotes

37 Sourced Quotes

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
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
Men often compete with one another until the day they die; comradeship consists of rubbing shoulders jocularly with a competitor.

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

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

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
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
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
Essays…hang somewhere on a line between two sturdy poles: This is what I think, and this is what I am.

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

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
I have worn many shirts, and not all of them have been a good fit. But when I am discouraged or downcast I need only fling open the door of my closet, and there, hidden behind everything else, hangs the mantle of Michel de Montaigne, smelling slightly of camphor.

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

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

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

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
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
Essays belong to the animal kingdom, with a surface that generates sparks, like a coat of fur, compared with the flat conventional cotton of the magazine article writer, who works in the vegetable kingdom, instead.

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

Edward Hoagland
Nobody expects to trust his body overmuch after the age of fifty.

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
Essays are associated with the way young writers fashion a name — on plain, crowded newsprint like The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, or The New York Review of Books, instead of the thick paper stock and thin readership of Partisan Review.

Edward Hoagland