Jack London quotes

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise.

He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time.

When the long winter nights come on and the wolves follow their meat into the lower valleys, he may be seen running at the head of the pack through the pale moonlight or glimmering borealis, leaping gigantic above his fellows, his great throat a-bellow as he sings a song of the younger world, which is the song of the pack.

Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, was the law; and this mandate, down out of the depths of Time, he obeyed.

He was beaten (he knew that); but he was not broken. He saw, once for all, that he stood no chance against a man with a club.

So that was the way. No fair play. Once down, that was the end of you.

Again and again, as he looked at each brutal performance, the lesson was driven home to Buck: a man with a club was a lawgiver, a master to be obeyed, though not necessarily conciliated.

He had killed man, the noblest game of all, and he had killed in the face of the law of club and fang.

He had been suddenly jerked from the heart of civilization and flung into the heart of things primordial.

For the pride of trace and trail was his, and, sick unto death, he could not bear that another dog should do his work.

He knew the law even better than did the dogs that had known no other life, and he observed the law more punctiliously; but still there was about him a suggestion of lurking ferocity, as though the Wild still lingered in him and the wolf in him merely slept.

The aim of life was meat. Life itself was meat. Life lived on life. There were the eaters and the eaten. The law was: EAT OR BE EATEN.

White Fang knew the law well: to oppress the weak and obey the strong.

It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.

His bondage had softened him. Irresponsibility had weakened him. He had forgotten how to shift for himself. The night yawned about him.

This was a god indeed, a love-god, a warm and radiant god, in whose light White Fang’s nature expanded as a flower expands under the sun.

Fear urged him to go back, but growth drove him on.

His conclusion was that things were not always what they appeared to be. The cub’s fear of the unknown was an inherited distrust, and it had now been strengthened by experience. Thenceforth, in the nature of things, he would possess an abiding distrust of appearances.

But the Wild is the Wild, and motherhood is motherhood, at all times fiercely protective whether in the Wild or out of it; and the time was to come when the she-wolf, for her grey cub’s sake, would venture the left fork, and the lair in the rocks, and the lynx’s wrath.

But it did not all happen in a day, this giving over of himself, body and soul, to the man-animals. He could not immediately forego his wild heritage and his memories of the Wild. There were days when he crept to the edge of the forest and stood and listened to something calling him far and away.

Class supremacy can rest only on class degradation; and when the workers are segregated in the Ghetto, they cannot escape the consequent degradation.

Man always gets less than he demands from life; and so little do they demand, that the less than little they get cannot save them.

The human soul is a lonely thing, but it must be very lonely sometimes when there are three beds to a room, and casuals with ten shillings are admitted.

And day by day I became convinced that not only is it unwise, but it is criminal for the people of the Abyss to marry.

But I am I, and I won’t subordinate my taste to the unanimous judgment of mankind.

— Spoken by a character · Chapter XXIV

Her own limits were the limits of her horizon; but limited minds can recognize limitations only in others.