"Inside all of us is a Wild Thing"
— Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are)

"Are wild strawberries really wild? Will they scratch an adult, will they snap at a child? Should you pet them, or let them run free where they roam? Could they ever relax in a steam-heated home? Can they be trained to not growl at the guests? Will a litterbox work or would they make a mess? Can we make them a Cowberry, herding the cows, or maybe a Muleberry pulling the plows, or maybe a Huntberry chasing the grouse, or maybe a Watchberry guarding the house, and though they may curl up at your feet oh so sweetly can you ever feel that you trust them completely? Or should we make a pet out of something less scary, like the Domestic Prune or the Imported Cherry, Anyhow, you've been warned and I will not be blamed if your Wild Strawberries cannot be tamed."
— Shel Silverstein (Where the Sidewalk Ends)

"Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us."
— Virginia Woolf (Jacob's Room)

"We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature."
— Henry David Thoreau (Walden: Or, Life in the Woods)

"“Firepaw held the menacing amber gaze for few moments. Warrior and apprentice, for a heartbeat their eyes were locked as enemies.”"
— Erin Hunter (Into the Wild)

"career's are demeaning twentieth century inventions, more a liability than an assett."
— Christopher McCandless

"We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it"
— Oscar Wilde

"If you risk nothing you gain nothing"
— Bear Grylls

"“I understood what he was doing. That he had spent four years fulfilling the absurd and tedious duty of graduating from college. And now, he was emancipated from that world of abstraction, false security, parents and material excess. The things that cut Chris off from the truth of his existence.”
"
— Carine "Into the Wild"

"The fragility of crystal is not a weakness but a fineness. My parents understood that fine crystal glass had to be cared for or may be shattered. But when it came to my brother, they didn’t seem to know or care that their course of their secret action brought the kind of devastation that could cut them. Their fraudulent marriage and our father’s denial of his other son was for Chris a murder of every day’s truth. He felt his whole life turned like a river suddenly reversing the direction of its flow. Suddenly running uphill. These revelations struck at the core of Chris’s sense of identity. They made his entire childhood seem like fiction. Chris never told them he knew and made me promise silence as well. “"
— Carine-"Into the Wild"

"There is a need to find and sing our own song, to stretch our limbs and shake them in a dance so wild that nothing can roost there, that stirs the yearning for solitary voyage."
— Barbara Lazear Ascher

"People in the West like to shoot things. When they first got to the West they shot buffalo. Once there were 70 million buffalo on the plains and then the people of the West started blasting away at them. Buffalo are just cows with big heads. If you'ave eaver looked a cow in the face and seen the unutterable depths of trust and stupidity that lie within, you will be able to guess how difficult it must have been for people in the West to track down buffalo and shoot them to pieces. By 1895, there were only 800 buffalo left, mostly in zoos and touring Wild West shows. With no buffalo left to kill, Westerners started shooting Indians. Between 1850 and 1890 they reduced the number of Indians in America from two million to 90,000.

Nowadays, thank goodness, both have made a recovery. Today there are 30,000 buffalo and 300,000 Indiands, and of course you are not allowed to shoot either, so all the Westerners have left to shoot at are road signs and each other, both of which they do rather a lot. There you have a capsule history of the West."
— Bill Bryson (The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America)

"Dream, imagine, let the words flow out, and let your mind go wild."
— Rylee Dawn

"He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight."
— Jon Krakauer (Into the Wild)

"Grant me some wild expressions, Heavens, or I shall burst."
— George Farquhar

"Thou strange piece of wild nature!"
— Colley Cibbe

"The sheer force of the music calls for a wild audience reaction."
— Emanuel Ax

""Please don't go. We'll eat you up. We love you so!" "
— Maurice Sendak

"Fire alone can save our Clan."
— Erin Hunter (Into the Wild)

"Two years he walks the Earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, 'cause "the West is the best." And now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual revolution. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the great white north. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild."
— Christopher McCandless

"At some point, one asks, "Toward what end is my life lived?" A great freedom comes from being able to answer that question. A sleeper can be decoyed out of bed by the sheer beauty of dawn on the open seas. Part of my job, as I see it, is to allow that to happen. Sleepers like me need at some point to rise and take their turn on morning watch for the sake of the planet, but also for their own sake, for the enrichment of their lives. From the deserts of Namibia to the razor-backed Himalayas, there are wonderful creatures that have roamed the Earth much longer than we, creatures that not only are worthy of our respect but could teach us about ourselves."
— Diane Ackerman (The Rarest of the Rare: Vanishing Animals, Timeless Worlds)

""And this is what happened, ands this is why the caribou and the wolf are one; for the caribou feeds the wolf, but it is the wolf that keeps the caribou strong.""
— Farley Mowat

"Away with us, he's going,
The solemn-eyed;
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hill-side.
Or the kettle on the hob,
Sing peace into his breast;
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the woods and waters wild,
With a fairy hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand."
— William Butler Yeats