Irwin Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Irwin. Here they are! All 100 of them:

There are too many books I haven’t read, too many places I haven’t seen, too many memories I haven’t kept long enough.
Irwin Shaw
No matter how nice the place is where you live, you need to experience life and the world.
Terri Irwin (MY STEVE)
Crocodiles are easy. They try to kill and eat you. People are harder. Sometimes they pretend to be your friend first.
Steve Irwin
Crocodiles are easy,' Steve said. 'They try to kill and eat you. People are harder. Sometimes they pretend to be your friend first.
Terri Irwin (Steve & Me)
There are too many books I haven't read, too many places I haven't seen, too many memories I haven't kept long enough
Irwin Shaw
If we can teach people about wildlife, they will be touched. Share my wildlife with me. Because humans want to save things that they love.
Steve Irwin
I have a message for my fans. Whatever you want to do in this world, it is achievable. The most important thing that I've found, that perhaps you could use, is be passionate and enthusiastic in the direction that you choose in life, and you'll be a winner.
Steve Irwin
I have no fear of losing my life - if I have to save a koala or a crocodile or a kangaroo or a snake, mate, I will save it.
Steve Irwin
My job, my mission, the reason I’ve been put onto this planet, is to save wildlife. And I thank you for comin’ with me. Yeah, let’s get 'em!
Steve Irwin
I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?
Irwin Shaw
And I realize the unbearable anguish of insanity: how uninformed people can be thinking insane people are "happy," O God, in fact it was Irwin Garden once warned me not to think the madhouses are full of "happy nuts." (p. 200)
Jack Kerouac (Big Sur)
I never drink while I'm working, but after a few glasses I get ideas that would never have occurred to me dead sober.
Irwin Shaw
It is a gift when someone can challenge you and open your mind to new ideas.
Terri Irwin (Steve & Me)
I have seen Tasmanian devils battle over a carcass. I have seen lionesses crowding a kill, dingoes on the trail of a feral piglet, and adult croc thrashing its prey to pieces. But never, in all the animal world, have I witnessed anything to match the casual cruelty of the human being.
Terri Irwin (Steve & Me)
Where I live if someone gives you a hug it’s from the heart.
Steve Irwin
An absolutely necessary part of a writer's equipment, almost as necessary as talent, is the ability to stand up under punishment, both the punishment the world hands out and the punishment he inflicts upon himself.
Irwin Shaw
If we save our wild places, we will ultimately save ourselves.
Steve Irwin (The Crocodile Hunter: The Incredible Life and Adventures of Steve and Terri Irwin)
Any good Irwin can make going to the corner store for a candy bar and a Coke lood death defying and suicidal.
Mira Grant
We don’t own the planet Earth, we belong to it. And we must share it with our wildlife.
Steve Irwin (The Crocodile Hunter: The Incredible Life and Adventures of Steve and Terri Irwin)
I look at everything. God gave me eyes and I look at women and men and subway excavations and moving pictures and the little flowers of the field. I casually inspect the universe.
Irwin Shaw (Short Stories of Irwin Shaw)
All writers are the same - they forget a thousand good reviews and remember one bad one.
Irwin Shaw
You know, you can touch a stick of dynamite, but if you touch a venomous snake it’ll turn around and bite you and kill you so fast it’s not even funny.
Steve Irwin
If you can’t excite people about wildlife, how can you convince them to love, cherish, and protect our wildlife and the environment they live in?
Steve Irwin (The Crocodile Hunter: The Incredible Life and Adventures of Steve and Terri Irwin)
Critics in New York are made by their dislikes, not by their enthusiasms.
Irwin Shaw
Tears sprang from her eyes and she bit her lip to stop herself from howling at the bright pain.
Stephen M. Irwin (The Dead Path)
Do I look like I know how to twerk? I'm a small blonde boy.
Ashton Irwin of 5SOS
We humans still have a long way to go with learning to live harmoniously with our environment and its wildlife.
Steve Irwin (The Crocodile Hunter: The Incredible Life and Adventures of Steve and Terri Irwin)
It is not enough to raise consciousness. One must lower the spirit into the earth to embody a change in things as basic as food, shelter, and livelihood.
William Irwin Thompson
ما قيمة هذه الدنيا التي تتعلقون بها ؟ ..
Irwin Shaw (Bury The Dead)
When your hero dies, everything he stood for does not end. Everything he stood for must continue.
Terri Irwin (MY STEVE)
There was nothing hesitant about the kiss, nothing uncertain. It was as if they'd both read the script beforehand and had—all along—simply been waiting for the cue.
Sophie Irwin (A Lady's Guide to Fortune-Hunting (A Lady's Guide, #1))
By God, how could you let her do such a thing?’ There was real, fierce anger in his voice. ‘She could have been hurt.’ ‘Let her?’ his friend expostulated, bridling in indignation. ‘Good God man, have you ever tried telling her what to do?
Sophie Irwin (A Lady's Guide to Fortune-Hunting)
Laine slowly rolled out of bed. The queen size was one of the few new things in the house. But now, even the new bed felt tainted. It was an inner-spring monument to lies, a petri dish of mendacity she had shared with her faithless husband, and shared now with creeping dreams that flew from the light but left harsh scratches and diseased black feathers. Laine promised herself that, as soon as, she could, she would rid herself of this house, this bed, her clothes, her jewelry - everything but the flesh she lived in. She would scrub herself clean and flee to start a new life whose first and only commandment would be: Never let thyself be lied to again.
Stephen M. Irwin (The Dead Path)
If the players were armed with guns, there wouldn’t be stadiums large enough to hold the crowds.
Irwin Shaw
The rain thundered down so heavily that Pritam could imagine that space itself was made of water and was pouring through rents in the sky's tired fabric.
Stephen M. Irwin (The Dead Path)
Until the day comes when the senseless killing ends, we will all have to fight like wildlife warriors to protect our precious planet.
Terri Irwin (Steve & Me)
It never ceases to amaze me how cruel some people are. Do you think people would be so merciless and torturous if fish and sharks cried like babies when they felt pain?
Steve Irwin (The Crocodile Hunter: The Incredible Life and Adventures of Steve and Terri Irwin)
I honestly do not know if love vanquishes death as our traditional faiths teach but I do know that our vulnerabilities trump our ideologies and that love leavens the purity and logic of our beliefs propelling us to connect as the fiercely gracious human beings we are.
Irwin Kula
I love you like a big fish
Ashton Irwin
Just keeping being you. Don't worry what people think. Being you is cool, okay?
Ashton Irwin
No matter how nasty people are in life, show kidness, smile through it and love, laugh, be good to people, just cause you can.
Ashton Irwin
People who can’t hack it as Irwins because they’re too violent go into the air travel industry.
Mira Grant (Deadline (Newsflesh, #2))
Never ever give up the fight
Ashton Irwin
HEADMASTER: I was a geographer. I went to Hull. IRWIN: Oh. Larkin. HEADMASTER: Everybody says that. 'Hull? Oh, Larkin.' I don't know about the poetry...as I say, I was a geographer...but as a librarian he was pitiless. The Himmler of the Accessions Desk. And now, we're told, women in droves. Art. They get away with murder.
Alan Bennett (The History Boys)
No writer need feel sorry for himself if he writes and enjoys the writing, even if he doesn’t get paid for it.
Irwin Shaw
The message is simple: love and conserve our wildlife.
Steve Irwin (The Crocodile Hunter: The Incredible Life and Adventures of Steve and Terri Irwin)
Irwins are never more alive than when they’re five minutes away from getting slaughtered.
Mira Grant (Deadline (Newsflesh, #2))
But a smell shivered him awake. It was a scent as old as the world. It was a hundred aromas of a thousand places. It was the tang of pine needles. It was the musk of sex. It was the muscular rot of mushrooms. It was the spice of oak. Meaty and redolent of soil and bark and herb. It was bats and husks and burrows and moss. It was solid and alive - so alive! And it was close. The vapors invaded Nicholas' nostrils and his hair rose to their roots. His eyes were as heavy as manhole covers, but he opened them. Through the dying calm inside him snaked a tremble of fear. The trees themselves seemed tense, waiting. The moonlight was a hard shell, sharp and ready to ready be struck and to ring like steel. A shadow moved. It poured like oil from between the tall trees and flowed across dark sandy dirt, lengthening into the middle of the ring. Trees seem to bend toward it, spellbound. A long, long shadow...
Stephen M. Irwin (The Dead Path)
When you help an animal, do your absolute best to make sure you don’t harm it at the same time, and Never walk past a problem with an animal—fix it.
Terri Irwin (Steve & Me)
It is always necessary to remain barbarians, because it is the barbarians who always win.
Irwin Shaw (The Young Lions)
That shoreline where the island of knowing meets the unfathomable sea of our own being is the landscape of myth.
William Irwin Thompson
You aren't on your own. You can find the greatest things in life in the smallest and simplest things, you just gotta take a moment.
Ashton Irwin
A taste of luxury is part of the education of any intelligent human being. It teaches him how unnecessary it is.
Irwin Shaw (Bread Upon the Waters)
Our story opens where countless stories have ended in the last twenty-seven years: with an idiot—in this case, Rebecca Atherton, head of the After the End Times Irwins, winner of the Golden Steve-o Award for valor in the face of the undead—deciding it would be a good idea to go out and poke a zombie with a stick to see what happens.
Mira Grant (Deadline (Newsflesh, #2))
IRWIN: At the time of the Reformation there were fourteen foreskins of Christ preserved, but it was thought that the church of St John Lateran in Rome had the authentic prepuce. DAKIN: Don't think we're shocked by your mention of the word 'foreskin', sir. CROWTHER: No, sir. Some of us even have them. LOCKWOOD: Not Posner, though, sir. Posner's like, you know, Jewish. It's one of several things Posner doesn't have. (Posner mouths 'fuck off.')
Alan Bennett (The History Boys)
Christ can forgive you," he whispered, though he didn't believe it. There wasn't a hint of compassion in those ice-blue eyes. "That's grand," she said. Her features became again those of the pleasant brown-haired nurse. She smiled, pulled the pillow from under his head, and covered his face.
Stephen M. Irwin (The Dead Path)
Be absolutely fearless of what people will say or think about you.
Ashton Irwin
In the realm of the phenomenal, "less is more" only when less is the sum total of more.
Robert Irwin
Irwin Garden once warned me not to think the madhouses are full of 'happy nuts,' There's a tightening around the head that hurts, there's a terror of the mind that hurts even more, they're so unhappy and especially because they can't explain it to anybody.
Jack Kerouac (Big Sur)
words of existential psychotherapist Irwin Yalom: To be human is to be lonely. To become a person means exploring new modes of resting in our loneliness. When we are willing to accept loneliness as a normal, recurring experience of life, we can learn to integrate it more graciously. We do not have to make loneliness or any other “negative” emotion more painful by adding shame, self-abandonment, or self-loathing to it.
Pete Walker (The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame)
Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.
Terri Irwin (Steve & Me)
The truth is that we will never save wildlife by killing it.
Steve Irwin (The Crocodile Hunter: The Incredible Life and Adventures of Steve and Terri Irwin)
I've only got forever and forever is fine
Ashton Irwin
Never forget the child inside
Ashton Irwin
يجب أن تترك الفرصة للإنسان ليمضي إلى قبره في هدوء ولا يقذف به إليه قذفا
Irwin Shaw (ثورة الموتى)
Would you - would you like to marry me, Kitty?' Lord Radcliffe - James - asked, voice like gravel. She gave a helpless little laugh at the absurdity of the question - as if he did not know. 'I would,' she said. 'But first, I feel I must inform you that I come with four sisters, a badly leaking roof, and a veritable ocean of debt.' He had started to smile now, and once begun it did not seem to stop, overtaking his whole face. “I thank you for your honesty,’ he said cordially, and she laughed. ‘May I reassure you that I am desperate to meet your other sisters, the roof sounds charmingly rustic, and the debt does not faze me.’ He paused. ‘Of course, I understand that you will need to see my accounts before committing yourself,’ he went on, and she laughed again, loud and bright. ‘I’m sure that won’t be necessary,’ she said. ‘As long as you can promise you’re absurdly rich and you’ll pay off all my family’s debts.’ ‘I am absurdly rich,’ he repeated. ‘And I will pay off all your family’s debts.’ ‘Why then by all means,’ she said, grinning up at him, ‘I would indeed like to marry you.
Sophie Irwin (A Lady's Guide to Fortune-Hunting (A Lady's Guide, #1))
Laine taped the last box shut. That was it, then: All of Gavin's belongings put away; some for charity, some for the dump, some to be saved for a happier 'one day' that Laine felt, right now, was as distant as the stars.
Stephen M. Irwin (The Dead Path)
Whales are like elephants of the sea. They have family structures, mannerisms, and habits that are similar to our own.
Terri Irwin (Steve & Me)
medieval attitudes such as “the only good croc is a dead one,” “the only good shark is a dead shark,” “there’s a snake—quick, kill it.
Steve Irwin (The Crocodile Hunter: The Incredible Life and Adventures of Steve and Terri Irwin)
Now more than ever we are all becoming more aware about the need to conserve our precious living heritage.
Steve Irwin (The Crocodile Hunter: The Incredible Life and Adventures of Steve and Terri Irwin)
If we can get people excited about animals, then by crikey, it makes it a heck of a lot easier to save them.
Steve Irwin
One crowded hour of glorious life is worth more than an age without a name. I had no regrets for Steve's glorious life, and I know he couldn't have lived any other way.
Terri Irwin (MY STEVE)
You don't know what hapiness is until you make an effort to discover hapiness.
Ashton Irwin
Our imperfections are the bonds that hold us together. We might as well recognize them.
Irwin Shaw (Bread Upon the Waters)
По едно време той беше промърморил "Завинаги" с устни, опрени до гърлото ѝ, и сега тя си спомни това, като си мислеше колко млад трябва да е човек, за да каже "завинаги".
Irwin Shaw (Lucy Crown)
The modern world, he thought resentfully, prepares you very poorly for the tests it puts you to.
Irwin Shaw (The Young Lions)
When you're onstage, part of you wants to be off as fast as possible. And once you're offstage, everything is in anticipation of the next time you're on.
Bill Irwin
The acid test is that all paranoids and fundamentalists lack a sense of humor, for humor is a chaos flux and flexibility, of ambiguity and multi-dimensionality, and that kind of erotic liveliness is precisely what the fundamentalist is trying to eliminate in holding rigidly to doctrine.
William Irwin Thompson
Irwin demonstrated that a single night of four hours of sleep—such as going to bed at three a.m. and waking up at seven a.m.—swept away 70 percent of the natural killer cells circulating in the immune system, relative to a full eight-hour night of sleep. That is a dramatic state of immune deficiency to find yourself facing, and it happens quickly, after essentially one “bad night” of sleep.
Matthew Walker (Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams)
Australia has one of the worst mammalian extinction rates in the world.
Steve Irwin (The Crocodile Hunter: The Incredible Life and Adventures of Steve and Terri Irwin)
scientific whaling, and other lies will be exposed and become atrocities of the past.
Steve Irwin (The Crocodile Hunter: The Incredible Life and Adventures of Steve and Terri Irwin)
Statistically there’s only one crocodile-related human fatality per year in the whole of Australia.
Steve Irwin (The Crocodile Hunter: The Incredible Life and Adventures of Steve and Terri Irwin)
Every single day of our lives involves wildlife education. We must teach, spread the word, the wildlife gospel.
Steve Irwin (The Crocodile Hunter: The Incredible Life and Adventures of Steve and Terri Irwin)
and I have stopped eating tuna until the tuna nets cease killing tens of thousands of dolphins every single year.
Steve Irwin (The Crocodile Hunter: The Incredible Life and Adventures of Steve and Terri Irwin)
It causes me great pain and anxiety to inflict fear on this poor old croc, but without me, he and his wilderness would suffer.
Steve Irwin (The Crocodile Hunter: The Incredible Life and Adventures of Steve and Terri Irwin)
It's easy to love men when you're sixteen. Every year after that, it gets just a little bit harder. Or maybe men just get a little bit duller.
Stephen M. Irwin
Hannah expected this to make her sob even more, but instead she found her tears drying up and her tummy growing warm. How dare they? How dare they do this to little girls? She understood now why her parents go so angry when they saw the result of bombers in the white hot streets of the Middle East, why men and women wailed in anger as well as grief as they lifted the limp bodies of children from the rubble. How dare they? No, she wasn't going to die like this, wrapped up like some helpless baby.
Stephen M. Irwin (The Dead Path)
She put her tongue out and felt the raw edges of the torn silk. She looped her tongue around them and drew them into her teeth. Just a little bit, she thought, that's all I need to free my eyelids. She pulled the tasteless web between her teeth and ground, pulling her jaw down in a grimace - it felt as it she was eating the very skin off her face. But the silk over her eyelids shifted.
Stephen M. Irwin (The Dead Path)
I don't know what you want from me then,' she cried, casting out her arms. 'For I cannot make my situation any different. I must marry. And so far, I have no promises.' He would not look at her. 'Ask me then,' she said, voice raw, 'ask me if I should like, if I should want to marry Pemberton, were the choice only about me?' He looked up. 'Would you?' 'No,' she said, voice cracking. 'Now ask me, whether I should still love you, were the choice only mine to make?' He took a step forward. 'Would you?' he said again. 'Yes,' she confessed. 'I will always choose my sisters. I will choose their need more than my want every day. But I want you just as much as I need money. You see me, in my entirety - the worst and the best of me - as no one else ever has.
Sophie Irwin (A Lady's Guide to Fortune-Hunting (A Lady's Guide, #1))
She was going to shoot him,’ Archie said, dazed. ‘I was not,’ Kitty insisted. ‘Give me that pistol,’ Hinsley instructed angrily, making a grab for it. ‘By George, do you have the faintest idea how to use it?’ ‘Well, not really,’ Kitty admitted. ‘But as it turns out, neither do you – it wasn’t loaded, you dolt. I checked as soon as you left. Are you honestly a soldier?’ ‘Dear God,’ Hinsley cursed. ‘Dear God.
Sophie Irwin (A Lady's Guide to Fortune-Hunting)
Horror would not annoy a soldier any more than the sight of a hammer annoys a carpenter. It is sentimental to pretend that horror is not the tool of the soldier, just as the hammer is the tool of the carpenter. We live off death and the threat of death and we must take it calmly and use it well.... Eventually I came to enjoy killing, as a pianist enjoys the Czerny which keeps his fingers limber for the Beethoven.
Irwin Shaw (The Young Lions)
After watching what this purchase had cost Irwin and Linda, Amy and I chose a different path. Love, we figured, may be the best thing that ever happens between two people. And that the best thing is of no worldly worth struck us a beautiful paradox--and an endangered one. We therefore began fighting to defend the worthlessness of lovers everywhere in the only way we knew how: by vowing to remain as inseparable from each other, and as utterly useless to all opportunists, as the rest of our responsibilities would allow.
David James Duncan (The Brothers K)
And I realize the unbearable anguish of insanity: how uninformed people can be thinking insane people are 'happy', O God, in fact it was Irwin Garden once warned me not to think the madhouses are full of 'happy nuts', 'There's a tightening around the head that hurts, there's a terror of the mind that hurts even more, they're so unhappy and especially because they cant explain it to anybody or reach out and be helped through all the hysterical paranoia they are really suffering more than anyone in the world and I think in the universe in fact,' and Irwin knew this from observing his mother Naomi who finally had to have a lobotomy ― Which sets me thinking how nice to cut away therefore all that agony in my forehead and STOP IT! STOP THAT BABBLING! ― Because now the babbling's not only in the creek, as I say it's left the creek and come in my head, it would be alright for coherent babbling meaning something but it's all brilliantly enlightened babble that does more than mean something: it's telling me to die because everything is over ― Everything is swarming all over me.
Jack Kerouac (Big Sur)
But first, I feel I must inform you that I come with four sisters, a badly leaking roof, and a veritable ocean of debt.’ He had started to smile now, and once begun it did not seem to stop, overtaking his whole face. ‘I thank you for your honesty,’ he said cordially, and she laughed. ‘May I reassure you that I am desperate to meet your other sisters, the roof sounds charmingly rustic, and the debt does not faze me.’ He paused. ‘Of course, I understand that you will need to see my accounts before committing yourself,’ he went on, and she laughed again, loud and bright. ‘I’m sure that won’t be necessary,’ she said. ‘As long as you can promise you’re absurdly rich and you’ll pay off all my family’s debts.’ ‘I am absurdly rich,’ he repeated. ‘And I will pay off all your family’s debts.
Sophie Irwin (A Lady's Guide to Fortune-Hunting)
When I went into the Army, I made up my mind that I was putting myself at the Army's disposal. I believe in the war. That doesn't mean I believe in the Army. I don't believe in any army. You don't expect justice out of an army, if you're a sensible, grown-up human being, you only expect victory. And if it comes to that, our Army is probably the most just one that ever existed. . . . I expected the Army to be corrupt, inefficient, cruel, wasteful, and it turned out to be all those things, just like all armies, only much less so than I thought before I got into it. It is much less corrupt, for example, than the German Army. Good for us. The victory we win will not be as good as it might be, if it were a different kind of army, but it will be the best kind of victory we can expect in this day and age, and I'm thankful for it.
Irwin Shaw (The Young Lions)
Why, Mr. Anderson?, Why, why?. Why do you do it? Why, why get up?. Why keep fighting?. Do you believe you're fighting...for something?. For more than your survival?. Can you tell me what it is?. Do you even know?; Is it freedom?, Or truth?. Perhaps peace?. Could it be for love? Illusions, Mr. Anderson. Vagaries of perception. Temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose. And all of them as artificial as the Matrix itself, although... only a human mind could invent something as insipid as love. You must be able to see it, Mr. Anderson. You must know it by now, You can't win. It's pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Anderson?. Why?, Why do you persist?. Agent Smith ( Matrix Revolutions Movie, 2003 ).
William Irwin (More Matrix and Philosophy: Revolutions and Reloaded Decoded (Popular Culture and Philosophy) (Popular Culture and Philosophy, 11))
I need to ask, are you afraid of spiders?" Nicholas blinked, suddenly caught off guard, "Yes, I'm afraid of spiders." "Were you always?" "What are you, a psychiatrist?" Pritam took a breath. He could feel Laine's eyes on him, appraising his line of questioning. "Is it possible that the trauma of losing your best friend as a child and the trauma of losing your wife as an adult and the trauma of seeing Laine's husband take his life in front of you just recently..." Pritam shrugged and raised his palms, "You see where I'm going?" Nicholas looked at Laine. She watched back. Her gray eyes missed nothing. "Sure," agreed Nicholas, standing. "And my sister's nuts, too, and we both like imagining that little white dogs are big nasty spiders because our daddy died and we never got enough cuddles." "Your father died?" asked Laine. "When?" "Who cares?" Pritam sighed. "You must see this from our point of - " "I'd love to!" snapped Nicholas. "I'd love to see it from your point of view, because mine is not that much fun! It's insane! It's insane that I see dead people, Pritam! It's insane that this," he flicked out the sardonyx necklace,"stopped me from kidnapping a little girl!" "That's what you believe," Pritam said carefully. "That's what I fucking believe!" Nicholas stabbed his finger through the air at the dead bird talisman lying slack on the coffee table.
Stephen M. Irwin (The Dead Path)
The world," said Pavone, "will swing to the left. The whole world except America. The world will swing, not because people read Karl Marx, or because agitators will come out of Russia, but because, after the war is over, that will be the only way they can turn. Everything else will have been tried, everything else will have failed. And I am afraid that American will be isolated, hated, backward, we will all be living there like old maids in a lonely house in the woods, locking the doors, looking under the beds, with a fortune in the mattress, not being able to sleep, because every time the wind blows and a floor creaks, we will think the murderers are breaking in to kill us and take our treasure...
Irwin Shaw (The Young Lions)
He got into the tub and ran a little cold water. Then he lowered his thin, hairy body into the just-right warmth and stared at the interstices between the tiles. Sadness--he had experienced that emotion ten thousand times. As exhalation is to inhalation, he thought of it as the return from each thrust of happiness. Lazily soaping himself, he gave examples. When he was five and Irwin eight, their father had breezed into town with a snowstorm and come to see them where they lived with their grandparents in the small Connecticut city. Their father had been a vagabond salesman and was considered a bum by people who should know. But he had come into the closed, heated house with all the gimcrack and untouchable junk behind glass and he had smelled of cold air and had had snow in his curly black hair. He had raved about the world he lived in, while the old people, his father and mother, had clucked sadly in the shadows. And then he had wakened the boys in the night and forced them out into the yard to worship the swirling wet flakes, to dance around with their hands joined, shrieking at the snow-laden branches. Later, they had gone in to sleep with hearts slowly returning to bearable beatings. Great flowering things had opened and closed in Norman's head, and the resonance of the wild man's voice had squeezed a sweet, tart juice through his heart. But then he had wakened to a gray day with his father gone and the world walking gingerly over the somber crust of dead-looking snow. It had taken him some time to get back to his usual equanimity. He slid down in the warm, foamy water until just his face and his knobby white knees were exposed. Once he had read Wuthering Heights over a weekend and gone to school susceptible to any heroine, only to have the girl who sat in front of him, whom he had admired for some months, emit a loud fart which had murdered him in a small way and kept him from speaking a word to anyone the whole week following. He had laughed at a very funny joke about a Negro when Irwin told it at a party, and then the following day had seen some white men lightly kicking a Negro man in the pants, and temporarily he had questioned laughter altogether. He had gone to several universities with the vague exaltation of Old Man Axelrod and had found only curves and credits. He had become drunk on the idea of God and found only theology. He had risen several times on the subtle and powerful wings of lust, expectant of magnificence, achieving only discharge. A few times he had extended friendship with palpitating hope, only to find that no one quite knew what he had in mind. His solitude now was the result of his metabolism, that constant breathing in of joy and exhalation of sadness. He had come to take shallower breaths, and the two had become mercifully mixed into melancholy contentment. He wondered how pain would breach that low-level strength. "I'm a small man of definite limitations," he declared to himself, and relaxed in the admission.
Edward Lewis Wallant (The Tenants of Moonbloom)
One night, as I cooked dinner in our home on the zoo grounds, I brooded over my troubles. I didn’t want to spend the evening feeling sorry for myself, so I thought about Steve out in the back, fire-gazing. He was a very lucky man, because for Steve, fire-gazing literally meant getting to build a roaring fire and sitting beside it, to contemplate life. Suddenly I heard him come thundering up the front stairs. He burst wild-eyed into the kitchen. He’s been nailed by a snake, I thought immediately. I didn’t know what was going on. “I know what we have to do!” he said, extremely excited. He pulled me into the living room, sat me down, and took my hands in his. Looking intensely into my eyes, he said, “Babe, we’ve got to have children.” Wow, I thought, that must have been some fire. “Ok-aaay,” I said. “You don’t understand, you don’t understand!” he said, trying to catch me up to his thoughts. “Everything we’ve been working for, the zoo that we’ve been building up, all of our efforts to protect wildlife, it will all stop with us!” As with every good idea that came into his head, Steve wanted to act on it immediately. Just take it in stride, I said to myself. But he was so sincere. We’d talked about having children before, but for some reason it hit him that the time was now. “We have got to have children,” he said. “I know that if we have kids, they will carry on when we’re gone.” “Great,” I said. “Let’s get right on that.” Steve kept pacing around the living room, talking about all the advantages of having kids--how I’d been so passionate about carrying on with the family business back in Oregon, and how he felt the same way about the zoo. He just knew our kids would feel the same too. I said, “You know, there’s no guarantee that we won’t have a son who grows up to be a shoe salesman in Malaysia.” “Come off the grass,” Steve said. “Any kid of ours is going to be a wildlife warrior.” I thought of the whale calves following their mamas below the cliffs of the Great Australian Bight and prepared myself for a new adventure with Steve, maybe the greatest adventure of all.
Terri Irwin (Steve & Me)