Lydia Millet

"The Safari Club International has worked the legal system hard to try to keep polar bears - threatened primarily by climate change, but also by hunting - on the list of creatures people can import as trophies after shooting."

"Marriage is like the romantic ideal, and yet the trappings around it and the culture about it are really the opposite of that."

"If you're going to do a thing, do it fully so that no writing you give the world misrepresents you - so that nothing you put out there is like a sad regift you couldn't throw away and had to find a place for."

"Children depend mightily on animals for comfort, inspiration, imagination, and art. And parents have long recognized this."

"The comic novels I did when I was in my 20s had a harder edge - less sympathy for people. Or a sympathy that was harder to detect: Characters' foibles and obsessive bents were unrelenting, like caricatures."

"We read our children stories starring elephants and monkeys and bears to teach them about nobility, curiosity and courage, to warn them against selfishness and stubbornness."

"I've seen a few wild grizzly bears, mostly in Alaska and British Columbia, and always from a distance. But each grizzly I've caught sight of was as fearsome and sublime as the last. You never get used to their raw power and massive bodies, or the mysterious intelligence in their dark, close-set eyes."

"In 1805, the explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, making their way across the West, were warned by American Indian tribes of grizzly bears' awesome strength."

"What makes 'The Lorax' such a powerful fable is partly its shamelessness. It pulls no punches it wears its teacher heart on its sleeve."