"Never love a wild thing... you can't give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they're strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. That's how you'll end up... If you let yourself love a wild thing. You'll end up looking at the sky."
— Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and Three Stories)

"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)

"The government trapper who took the grizzly knew he had made Escudilla safe for cows. He did not know he had toppled the spire off an edifice a-building since the morning stars sang together. The bureau chief who sent the trapper was a biologist versed in the architecture of evolution, but he did not know that spires might be as important as cows... The Congressmen who voted money to clear the ranges of bears were the sons of pioneers. They acclaimed the superior virtues of the frontiersman, but they strove with might and main to make an end of the frontier... Escudilla still hangs on the horizon, but when you see it you no longer think of bear. It's only a mountain now."
— Aldo Leopold (A Sand County Almanac: With Other Essays on Conservation from Round River [Illustrated])

"The government trapper who took the grizzly knew he had made Escudilla safe for cows. He did not know he had toppled the spire off an edifice a-building since the morning stars sang together. The bureau chief who sent the trapper was a biologist versed in the architecture of evolution, but he did not know that spires might be as important as cows... The Congressmen who voted money to clear the ranges of bears were the sons of pioneers. They acclaimed the superior virtues of the frontiersman, but they strove with might and main to make an end of the frontier... Escudilla still hangs on the horizon, but when you see it you no longer think of bear. It's only a mountain now."
— Aldo Leopold