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If a person sings quietly to himself on the street people smile with approval but if he talks it's not alright they think he's crazy. The singer is presumed to be happy and the talker unhappy.

Edward Hoagland

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Edward Hoagland
Age: 92
Born: 1932
Born: December 21
Author
Writer
New York
United States
Think
Unhappy
Sings
Thinking
Street
Alright
People
Smile
Quietly
Streets
Talks
Crazy
Approval
Happy
Singer
Talker
Persons
Singers
Presumed
Person
Philosophical
Talkers

More quotes by Edward Hoagland

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In order to really enjoy a dog, one doesn't merely try to train him to be semi-human. The point of it is to open oneself to the possibility of becoming partly a dog.
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The question of whether it's God's green earth is not at center stage, except in the sense that if so, one is reminded with some regularity that He may be dying.
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True solitude is a din of birdsong, seething leaves, whirling colors, or a clamor of tracks in the snow.
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Poetry is engendered in solitude, so what better meter for it than the clip of a buckskin horse?
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A writer's work is to witness things.
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Country people tend to consider that they have a corner on righteousness and to distrust most manifestations of cleverness, while people in the city are leery of righteousness but ascribe to themselves all manner of cleverness.
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Man is different from animals in that he speculates, a high-risk activity.
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Indeed, if biology is chemistry with history, as somebody has said, then nature writing is biology with love.
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The novelist screws up his courage in order to invest another two or three years in another attempt to float a boat of original design upon an invented ocean.
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If two people are in love they can sleep on the blade of a knife.
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To relive the relationship between owner and slave we can consider how we treat our cars and dogs - a dog exercising a somewhat similar leverage on our mercies and an automobile being comparable in value to a slave in those days
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It would be hard to define chaos better than as a world where children decide they don't want to live.
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Our loneliness makes us avid column readers these days.
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Animals used to provide a lowlife way to kill and get away with it, as they do still, but, more intriguingly, for some people they are an aperture through which wounds drain. The scapegoat of olden times, driven off for the bystanders sins, has become a tender thing, a running injury. There, running away is me: hurt it and you are hurting me.
Edward Hoagland
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Country people do not behave as if they think life is short they live on the principle that it is long, and savor variations of the kind best appreciated if most days are the same.
Edward Hoagland
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There often seems to be a playfulness to wise people, as if either their equanimity has as its source this playfulness or the playfulness flows from equanimity and they can persuade other people who are in a state of agitation to calm down and smile.
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Men greet each other with a sock on the arm, women with a hug, and the hug wears better in the long run.
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Silence is exhilarating at first - as noise is - but there is a sweetness to silence outlasting exhilaration, akin to the sweetness of listening and the velvet of sleep.
Edward Hoagland
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Many people have believed that they were Chosen, but none more baldly than the Texans.
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If human nature eventually is going to take the place of nature everywhere, those of us who have been naturalists will have to transpose the faith in nature which is inherent in the profession to a faith in man-if necessary, man alone in the world.
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