“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!”

“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.”

“Werewolves did not consider wolves one of their own; in fact, wolves were inferior. They were hunters, strong and ravenous like them, but they weren't as big or as intelligent.”

“[Stephenson] believes that, as research becomes more airborne and more office-bound, we generalize more and more, and we lose the vast range of wolf experience; in fact, there are soft wolves and hard wolves, kind wolves and malicious wolves, soldiers and nurses, philosophers and bullies. ”