Quotes about dogs

Honestly, sometimes you'd rather be a dog. A mutt doesn't torture itself with thinking.

There are some dogs which, when you meet them, remind you that, despite thousands of years of manmade evolution, every dog is still only two meals away from being a wolf. These dogs advance deliberately, purposefully, the wilderness made flesh, their teeth yellow, their breath astink, while in the distance their owners witter, "He's an old soppy really, just poke him if he's a nuisance," and in the green of their eyes the red campfires of the Pleistocene gleam and flicker . . .

This dog would make even a dog like that slink nonchalantly behind the sofa and pretend to be extremely preoccupied with its rubber bone.

It was already growling, and the growl was a low, rumbling snarl of spring-coiled menace, the sort of growl that starts in the back of one throat and ends up in someone else's.

Dogs don't make mistakes.

That the dog should die was after the beautiful, faithful nature of dogs.

At the age of thirty, or thereabouts, this young Nobleman had not only had every experience that life has to offer, but had seen the worthlessness of them all. Love and ambition, women and poets were all equally vain. Literature was a farce. The night after reading Greene's Visit to a Nobleman in the Country, he burnt in a great conflagration fifty-seven poetical works, only retaining 'The Oak Tree', which was his boyish dream and very short. Two things alone remained to him in which he now put any trust: dogs and nature; an elk-hound and a rose bush. The world, in all its variety, life in all its complexity, had shrunk to that. Dogs and a bush were the whole of it.

Love in animals, has not for its only object animals of the same species, but extends itself farther, and comprehends almost every sensible and thinking being. A dog naturally loves a man above his own species, and very commonly meets with a return of affection.

... Stevens himself hating horses even more than dogs, rating the horse an unassailable first in loathing since though both were parasites, the dog at least had the grace to be a sycophant too; it at least fawned on you and so kept you healthily ashamed of the human race. But the real reason was, though neither the horse nor the dog ever forgot anything, the dog at least forgave you; and his, Stevens's, thought was that what the world needed was more forgiving.

And in that town a dog was found,

As many dogs there be,

Both mongrel, puppy, whelp, and hound,

And curs of low degree.

The dog, to gain some private ends,

Went mad, and bit the man.

As it happens, the Herk household did have a dog, named Roger. Roger was the random result of generations of hasty, unplanned dog sex: Among other characteristics, he had the low-slung body of a beagle, the pointy ears of a German shepherd, the enthusiasm of a Labrador retriever, the stubby tail of a boxer, and the intelligence of celery. (Chapter 2)

"Stotting" is jumping upward with all four legs simultaneously. My advice: do not die until you've seen a large black poodle stotting in the snow.