“Those wolves were crueler even than the Japanese devils. They knew that all they had to do was rip open the bellies and let the horses die under their own hooves. I've never seen anything more sinister, more savage in my life. Those wolves embody the spirit of the Japanese samurai. Suicidal attacks don't faze them, and that makes Mongol wolves more fearful than any others. I won't rest till I kill every last one of them!”

“The grassland is a big life, but it's thinner than people's eyelids. If you rupture its grassy surface, you blind it, and dust storms are more lethal than the white-hair blizzards. If the grassland dies, so will the cows and sheep and horses, as well as the wolves and the people, all the little lives.”

“Protecting the grassland is hard on us. If we don't kill wolves, they'll be fewer of us. But if we kill too many of them, there'll be even fewer.”

“How did people manage before there were flashlights?" Chen asked."With torches, wood wrapped with butter-soaked felt. They were as bright as these, and the wolves were scared to death of them. If one came at you, you could burn it's fur.”

“All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.All of them?Sure, he says. Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist.”

“The real problem is that humans do not yet know enough about wolves, even though these animals have been intensively studied now for more than forty years. This means that there are no "wolf experts." Instead, there are some people who know a good deal about wolves, but there is no one person who knows ALL about them.”

“Dolores liked that story. Men were wolves and practical women took the knife to them, and those wolves, those sharp-toothed men, they didn’t come back after that.”