“I've seen a few wild grizzly bears, mostly in Alaska and British Colum...” — Lydia Millet Quote

“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.”

“Historically, grizzlies ranged from Alaska to Mexico, with at least 50,000 bears living in the western half of the contiguous United States. With European colonization, the bears were shot, poisoned, and trapped to the brink of extinction.”

“There are a lot of obstacles in the way of our understanding animal intelligence - not the least being that we can't even agree whether nonhuman species are conscious. We accept that chimps and dolphins experience awareness; we like to think dogs and cats do. But what about mice and newts? What about a fly? Is anything going on there at all?”

“If a cat does something, we call it instinct; if we do the same thing, for the same reason, we call it intelligence.”

“I had served in the Republic of Korea in the early '80s while I was on active duty as a director of intelligence for U.S. forces Korea, and kind of followed developments on the peninsula ever since.”