“[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. ”

“It's the discomforting end of humankind's bargain with consciousness. We empathize with other beings and imagine we feel their pain. Either the empathy binds us to the mechanics of live, or we shut the empathy off. ”

“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.”

“Wolves and those who see them are shot on sight.”

“We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.”

“Death is nature's way of making things continually interesting. Death is the possibility of change. Every individual gets its allotted lifespan, its chance to try something new on the world. But time is called and the molecules which make up leaf and limb, heart and eye are disassembled and redistributed to other tenants.”

“But Olson had learned that being a wolf advocate wasn't easy, for "the politics of wolf preservation and the science of studying wolves is more vicious and complicated than any wolf pack I've had the pleasure of studying.”