He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars.Narrator in The Call of the Wild, Chapter 7
Old longings nomadic leap, Chafing at custom's chain; Again from its brumal sleep Wakens the ferine strain.Narrator in The Call of the Wild, Prologue
He was a killer, a thing that preyed, living on the things that lived, unaided, alone, by virtue of his own strength and prowess, surviving triumphantly in a hostile environment where only the strong survive.Narrator in The Call of the Wild, Chapter 3
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. He had learned the lesson, and in all his after life he never forgot it.Narrator in The Call of the Wild, Chapter 1
They were expressions of life, and life is always happy when it is expressing itself.Narrator in The Call of the Wild, Chapter 7
But especially he loved to run in the dim twilight of the summer midnights, listening to the subdued and sleepy murmurs of the forest, reading signs and sounds as a man may read a book, and seeking for the mysterious something that called - called, waking or sleeping, at all times, for him to come.Narrator in The Call of the Wild, Chapter 7
Yet it was the law of life that he had learned; the law that lived , ceased to live.Narrator in The Call of the Wild, Chapter 3
He saw, once for all, that he stood no chance against a man with a club.Narrator about Buck in The Call of the Wild, Chapter 1
All that stirring of old instincts which at stated periods drives men out from the sounding cities to forest and plain to kill things by chemically propelled leaden pellets, the blood lust, the joy to kill - all this was Buck's, only it was infinitely more intimate.Narrator in The Call of the Wild, Chapter 3
The dominant primordial beast was strong in Buck, and under the fierce conditions of trail life it grew and grew.Narrator in The Call of the Wild, Chapter 3