“One of the most difficult of all things to endure for a crow, a raven, a wolf, or a human is to feel alone and separated from one's own kind. A sense of belonging is one of the most universal of all feelings.”

“Human desire is the criterion of all truth and all good. Truth does not lie beyond humanity, but is one of the products of the human mind and feeling. There is really nothing to fear. The motive of fear in religion is base...”

“One watches them on the seashore, all the people, and there is something pathetic, almost wistful in them, as if they wished their lives did not add up to this scaly nullity of possession, but as if they could not escape. It is a dragon that has devoured us all: these obscene, scaly houses, this insatiable struggle and desire to possess, to possess always and in spite of everything, this need to be an owner, lest one be owned. It is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly disease. One feels a sort of madness come over one, as if the world had become hell. But it is only superimposed: it is only a temporary disease. It can be cleaned away.”

“Humans, particularly those influenced by the Judeo-Christian ethic, see themselves as rulers of the earth, an attitude stemming not from divine doctrines, but rather from human interpretation of them. Those governed by such erroneous tenets look upon animals as chattels, organisms that have been divinely created for human use and convenience. But domestic animals are the work of man. The wolf and all other wild beings are the work of nature; they are PURE WILD, gloriously so. This is why a wolf can never be owned; it cannot be mastered.”

“I had dropped one form and not taken on the other, and was become like Mohammed's coffin in our legend, with a resultant feeling of intense loneliness in life, and a contempt, not for other men, but for all they do.”

“Most men have at least one redeeming feature. Finding one for Brother Rike requires a stretch. Is 'big' a redeeming feature?”

“Used to all kinds of society, she watched people as one reads the pages of a novel, with a certain disinterested amusement.”