Craig Childs > Quotes

“Most animals show themselves sparingly. The grizzly bear is six to eight hundred pounds of smugness. It has no need to hide. If it were a person, it would laugh loudly in quiet restaurants, boastfully wear the wrong clothes for special occasions, and probably play hockey.”
― Craig Childs, The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild

“Coyotes move within a landscape of attentiveness. I have seen their eyes in the creosote bushes and among mesquite trees. They have watched me. And all the times that I saw no eyes, that I kept walking and never knew, there were still coyotes. When I have seen them trot away, when I have stepped from the floorboard of my truck, leaned on the door, and watched them as they watched me over their shoulders, I have been aware for that moment of how much more there is. Of how I have only seen only an instant of a broad and rich life.”
― Craig Childs, The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild

“This is not wilderness for designation or for a park. Not a scenic wilderness and not one good for fishing or the viewing of wildlife. It is wilderness that gets into your nostrils, that runs with your sweat. It is the core of everything living, wilderness like molten iron.”
― Craig Childs, The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild

“The elk that you glimpse in the summer, those at the forest edge, are survivors of winter, only the strongest. You see one just before dusk that summer, standing at the perimeter of the meadow so it can step back to the forest and vanish. You can't help imagining the still, frozen nights behind it, so cold that the slightest motion is monumental. I have found their bodies, half drifted over in snow, no sign of animal attack or injury. Just toppled over one night with ice working into their lungs. You wouldn't want to stand outside for more than a few minutes in that kind of weather. If you lived through only one of those winters the way this elk has, you would write books about it. You would become a shaman. You would be forever changed. That elk from the winter stands there on the summer evening, watching from beside the forest. It keeps its story to itself.”
― Craig Childs, The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild

“This far north the sun was still up, although very low, riding through the mountains as if looking for something it lost on the ground.”
― Craig Childs, The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild

“The life of an animal lies outside of conjecture. It is far beyond the scientific papers and the campfire stories. It is as true as breath. It is important as the words of children.”
― Craig Childs, The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild

“There are so many of us now that we threaten to devour the world with our touching, starting with the things we adore most. At the same time, we obviously yearn for contact, and I fear what would happen if we were cut off from a distinctive, on-the-ground relationship with the past.”
― Craig Childs, Finders Keepers: A Tale of Archaeological Plunder and Obsession

“A trademark of something that works well, the cat body has hardly changed since its inception. Like with today's cats, their digestive systems could handle only flesh. The lesson of the cat is that if you are to become a full-fledged carnivore, you have to commit everything to it. A house cat fed vegetarian food will shrivel and die.”
― Craig Childs, The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild

“Like any stage of the hydrologic process, we have our own peculiarities, our organs making us nothing more than water pools or springs of bizarre shape, filled with pulsing tubes and chambers.”
― Craig Childs, The Secret Knowledge of Water

“It is as true as breath. It is as important as the words of children. ”
― Craig Childs

“When you place your hand in moving water, you will feel the curves of power looping your bones, addressing your skin with logarithmic sways. Magnify that ten or twenty thousand times and you will be killed by the force. Then your body will know.... But pay attention in that moment and you will feel the intelligence of water upon you. It will tell stories of itself against your body in boils and surges and vacancies.”
― Craig Childs, The Secret Knowledge of Water

“I grew up in motion. I have never lived outside the Southwest, yet in my childhood I rarely had the same home or lived in the same state for more than a year or two at a time. Well before adulthood I believed that all was right with the world only when I was standing at the brink of every possibility, a voyage not yet taken unraveling before me.”
― Craig Childs, House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest

“We guard our bodies until they are old and tasteless, when we could have fed ourselves to claw and fur, been literally reincarnated in the cells of a lion sleeping in the sun, the wall of muscle that is a bear crashing through a rotten log in search of ant eggs. Why not return again and again, glistening, gilded every time?”
― Craig Childs, The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild

“There seemed to be a pattern to the drips from each seep, a pattern I had heard before, wondering each time if there might be a sort of specific timing.... The sounds were predisposed, unaware of anything more important than their own syncopation.”
― Craig Childs, The Secret Knowledge of Water

“This is the yin and yang of the earth, an energetic feedback. What happens below relates directly to what is happening on the surface and in the atmosphere and vice versa. Tectonics does not end at the ground beneath your feet. It is a dynamic system from the earth's interior all the way into the sky and back.”
― Craig Childs, Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Ever-Ending Earth

“Mountain lions are psychological animals, preying on the mind with secret eyes. They know that they still dominate, that they cannot be cornered without ripping their way out. They know that they are still the heart of firceness. Being pack animals ourselves, we humans have some alliance with other pack animals, like wolves or coyotes. When I see a free wolf, I feel as if we could sit down and talk, given that the details have been worked out. Not so with the cat. The cat speaks in symbols.”
― Craig Childs, The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild

“They may not become extinct immediately, but being pushed out of decaying or destroyed habitats eventually takes its toll. The concept is known as extinction debt, the delay between the stress on species and the final dwindling of the last survivors until the organisms disappear and are never seen again.”
― Craig Childs, Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Ever-Ending Earth

“Now come the floods. They charge down atavistic canyons drinking furiously out of thunderstorms, coming one after the next with vomited boulders and trees pounding from one side of a canyon to the other, sometimes no more than hours apart. Sometimes a hundred years apart. Sometimes a thousand. The floods always come.”
― Craig Childs, The Secret Knowledge of Water

“But on the voluptuous stone of the Colorado Plateau nothing is ever as it appears. There is constant potential. The desert is not dried up and empty as if it might blow away like the seeds of brittle grass. It is the bones of the earth brought to daylight, half stuck out of the ground so that winds and flash floods constantly reveal more. Just as it is beneath our flesh, the bones are the sturdiest, most lasting parts. With their hollowed sockets and deliberate lines, they set a foundation upon which the flesh of forests, mountains, and oceans might accumulate. Only here, the flesh is gone, the last of it turned to dune sand.”
― craig childs

“I’ve often thought that a planet without water would be a dull, sad place. Most, if not all, water on this planet came from countless small comets thumping against the atmosphere (which continues at about ten thousand comets or pieces of comets per day, enough to add a twenty-five-foot depth of water across the entire globe every half a million years). That it comes from space suggests why it is so peculiar and fascinating here on earth. It is a substance from far beyond our reach.”
― Craig Childs, The Secret Knowledge of Water : There are Two Easy Ways to Die in the Desert: Thirst and Drowning

“The moon is the better storyteller for this event. Our ancient craters are smoothed over by erosion and tectonic motion. With no erosion, no wind, and no liquid water on the moon, craters can remain perfectly visible for billions of years, an orbiting catalog of impacts.”
― Craig Childs, Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Ever-Ending Earth

“One small cloud had passed while we were out walking earlier in the day. It had dragged a quarter acre of shade across the desert, and we had set off chasing it, sprinting to catch up so we could get under its shade. Before we got there, the cloud lifted its skirt and sailed off, evaporating into nothing. We were left empty-handed, my oiled hat brim wilted in the sun.”
― Craig Childs, House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest

“The sound of slapping water, the deep swallows made only by large masses of liquid, was almost too much to bear. I stood at the edge of the waterpocket, where much of the desert dropped off below, showing pockets of even greater size, and lifted my arms straight into the sky. Beads came down my body. This was abundance.”
― Craig Childs, The Secret Knowledge of Water

“Two richly dressed skeletons were discovered lying on a bed of fifty-six thousand pieces of turquoise, surrounded by fine ceramic vessels, and covered by a sheet of ivory-colored shells imported from the ocean six hundred miles away.”
― Craig Childs, House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest

“A wind started up. It began scouring our cheeks, and we lifted hands, blocking our faces from a gauze of blowing sand. So much wind came that it was hard to breathe without covering our noses and mouths. We stood and shouldered our packs to keep going. Sidewinder tracks lifted off the dunes and flew around us.”
― Craig Childs, The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild

“Water in flood means exactly what it says. It has no hypocrisy. Even as it murders, it leaves life behind and carves elegant, intricate passages into raw stone, all the while having no debate about its intention. It is the same water that will sit complacently in a hole for months or years, the same arrangement of atoms that flows gently, singing lullabies, the same that fiercely consumes children and tears the walls from titanic canyons.”
― Craig Childs, The Secret Knowledge of Water

“Sidewinder tracks lifted off the dunes and flew around us.”
― Craig Childs, The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild

“Todd and I carried tents framed with plastic bones and thin metal poles, bug screens and nylon. To Pleistocene travelers accustomed to hides on wood frames and floors dug into the earth, peeled down to permafrost, our tents would have looked as if we were draping ourselves nightly in gossamer. What would have been the use? People have different needs at different times. Our tents kept mosquitoes out. Theirs warded off giant bears and Beringian wolves, a piece of ground to defend, the difference between travelers and inhabitants.”
― Craig Childs, Atlas of a Lost World: Travels in Ice Age America

“Voices for the Land The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the other way around. —Senator Gaylord Nelson, founder of Earth Day”
― Craig Childs, Tracing Time: Seasons of Rock Art on the Colorado Plateau

“Deet works. It turns skin so toxic that mosquitos have no wish to poison themselves on it. The problem is that this stuff that melted our dry- box quickly enters the bloodstream from the skin . The first published report of brain damage came in 1961. Following several weeks of use, 6 young girls developed toxic encephalopathy and suffered convulsions. One girl died. Mostly the effects were neurological : headaches, dizziness, slurred speech, confusion. You could also get a good dose of nausea and abdominal pain.”
― Craig Childs, Crossing Paths: Uncommon Encounters With Animals in the Wild