Barking Dogs Quotes & Sayings

I was surrounded on all sides by the indifferent torpidity of summer, somewhere there were dogs barking lazily, while the machine-gun barrel of the sun was strafing the earth in a continuous, never-ending burst of fire. — Victor Pelevin

Sometimes you have to understand that you push ahead, there's going to be a lot of flak, there's going to be a lot of dogs barking, but the wagon train moves ahead. — Juan Williams

It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself up out of the dark abyss of pish and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash. — H.L. Mencken

The third board popped off. The opening was now big enough to squeeze through. The dogs in town were barking hysterically. — Douglas Preston

The odious little dogs that French people seemed to like so much rushed out at him as he rode by, barking furiously. — Paul Bowles

We're all making castles in the sand, wonderful tapestries, an exquisite corpse. But is it meaningful? No. It's dogs barking. It doesn't mean anything beyond our yelping, at the pain of being alive. — Ariel Pink

When boys talked, it sounded like feral dogs barking. They fiended for attention, were always aggressive, and made me wish I could put them down. — Gabby Rivera

I could hear my dogs barking. Worse I could hear bleating. Joyful goat chuckles of freedom.
"The goats!" I clutched my head, an absurdly melodramatic reaction suited to this farce. "The goats were in the tree!"
"The ... Wait, what? — Rosemary Clement-Moore

We have always had dogs, and they have faithfully performed many valuable services for us, such as: 1. Peeing on everything. 2. When we're driving in our car, alerting us that we have passed another dog by barking real loud in our ears for the next 114 miles. 3. Trying to kill the Avon lady. — Dave Barry

God turns clouds inside out to make fluffy beds for the dogs in Dog Heaven, and when they are tired from running and barking and eating ham-sandwich biscuits, the dogs find a cloud bed for sleeping. God watches over each one of them. And there are no bad dreams. — Cynthia Rylant

The moonlight came in with the sounds of the city: juke boxes, automobiles, curses, dogs barking, radios ... We were all in it together. — Charles Bukowski

The screen blanked, then produced a book cover. The jacket image - in black-and-white - showed barking dogs surrounding a scarecrow. In the background, shoulders slumped in a posture of weariness or defeat (or both), was a hunter with a gun. The eponymous Cortland, probably. — Stephen King

I once compiled a list of events that frightened her, and it was quite comprehensive: very loud snoring; low-flying aircraft; church bells; fire engines; trains; buses and lorries; thunder; shouting; large cars; most medium-sized cars; noisy small cars; burglar alarms; fireworks, especially crackers; loud radios; barking dogs; whinnying horses; nearby silent horses; cows in general; megaphones; sheep; corks coming out of sparkling wine bottles; motorcycles, even very small ones; balloons being popped; vacuum cleaners (not being used by her); things being dropped; dinner gongs; parrot houses; whoopee cushions; chiming doorbells; hammering; bombs; hooters; old-fashioned alarm clocks; pneumatic drills; and hairdryers (even those used by her). — John Cleese

I walked her to her door and said good night, while Romeo waited. "I'll see you in the morning," I said, 'when the barking dogs arouse the sleeping tepee village and the smell of roasting coyote is in the air."

"My sisters will prepare me," she said. "I shall come to your wickiup in my white doeskin dress and lose my innocence on your buffalo robe."

"I will give you little ornaments to put in your hair, black as the crow's wing. I will give you red flannel and a looking-glass so that you may groom yourself."

"I'd also like to have a little spending money and a charge account at Wormser's," she said.

"Good night, Maiden Who Walks Like a Duck."

"Good night, Warrior Who Chickens Out at the Least Sign of Trouble. — Richard Bradford

Barking dogs don't bite, but they themselves don't know it. — Sholom Aleichem

You take off that pretend ring and get yourself a real man. You tell him to put his head between your legs and don't come up 'til you're howling his name load enough to get all the dogs in the neighbourhood barking. — Mimi Strong

Flowers were blooming, withered soon.. Rains kept falling, wasn't forever.. Dogs were barking, just for sometime.. Sun, moon & stars were invisible at times, but they kept watching you.. Let them shine for you, before it's too late.. — Heshan Udunuwara

My loneliness ... still comes over me sometimes ... It's a liminal, lost sensation of having wandered wide, endless boulevards, among rows of orange trees, winter butterflies, seasons reversed and out of order, dogs barking from behind fences meant to keep out intruders. It's not the place that impoverishes me but I who bring my own sense of poverty, of loss, to the place. It's a sense of near nothingness, as though I were not so much a blank slate as an erased chalkboard, still bearing illegible smudges of smoothed-over writing. — Marco Roth

If you listen to dogs barking you will go deaf without learning anything. — Marion Zimmer Bradley

I like dogs
Big dogs
Little dogs
Fat dogs
Doggy dogs
Old dogs
Puppy dogs
I like dogs
A dog that is barking over the hill
A dog that is dreaming very still
A dog that is running wherever he will
I like dogs. — Margaret Wise Brown

My sister and I practiced our howling and barking so we would be able to talk to our dogs if our mother ever let us get any. — Cynthia Kadohata

A moment later,the gunshot startled them all, well, all of them except Chad Kinkaid, who fired it. The dogs that had followed him in had still been barking around his horse's feet. The shot hit the dirt near them and sent them hightailing it elsewhere.
Amanda had squealed in surprise,one hand had flown to her chest and was still there. "Was that really necessary?" she asked derisively.
Chad Kinkaid pulled his hat back down over his forehead,gathered his reins in preparation of riding off, and with a lazy smile,said, "No,ma'am. It was a pleasure though. — Johanna Lindsey

The reign of Christ has been established. The nations who object to this settlement trouble the decrees of God about as much as dogs barking at the moon trouble the moon. — Douglas Wilson

In the woods, if you stopped, if you grew still, you'd hear a whole new set of sounds, wind rasping through silhouetted leaves and the cries and chatter of blue jays and brown thrashers and redbirds and sparrows, the calling of crows and hawks, squirrels barking, frogs burping, the far braying of dogs, armadillos snorkeling through dead leaves ... — Tom Franklin

Hence it happens that today so many dogs assail this doctrine with their venomous bitings, or at least with barking: for they wish nothing to be lawful for God beyond what their own reason prescribes for themselves. Also they rail at us with as much wantonness as they can; because we, not content with the precepts of the law, which comprise God's will, say also that the universe is ruled by his secret plans. — John Calvin

And what if ever on some distant day a memory comes to you of an old familiar whiff or the sound of dogs barking far off or a driving hailstorm at dawn and you suddenly fail to grasp what it is you have done, what madness might have possessed you, what devil lured you from your home to the end of the world? — Amos Oz

Walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the same street each with the lamplight of the living room, shining golden, and inside the little blue square of the television, each living family riveting its attention on probably one show; nobody talking; silence in the yards; dogs barking at you because you pass on human feet instead of wheels. — Geoff Nicholson

I sat back down and poured a glass of wine. I left my door open. The moonlight came in with the sounds of the city: juke boxes, automobiles, curses, dogs barking, radios ... We were all in it together. We were all in one big shit pot together. There was no escape. We were all going to be flushed away. — Charles Bukowski

The barking of the dogs was getting louder, closer once more. Jesse's finger curled
around the trigger. He tried to still his mind from all thoughts. But the image of Miss
Althea lingered.
Sweet-smelling Miss Althea with her warm smile and her so very round parts. She never looked at him mean or like she was afraid. She looked at him loving, warm and loving, like she looked at the boy. She looked at Jesse that way. And he liked it. He really liked it. But he wanted it different, too. He was not a boy. Jesse was a man. He wanted Miss Althea to see that. He wanted to put meat on her table. That's what men do for the women they love. — Pamela Morsi

The attendant opened the door, and the faint barking Nina had heard before became frantic and shrill. Nina stepped into the concrete cell block and stopped, blown out of her self-absorption by the row of gray metal cages where dogs barked to get her attention. She let her breath out, horrified. "Oh, God, this is awful." "Spay your pets." The attendant stopped in front of the next to last cage. "Here you go." She jerked her head again. "Perky." Nina — Jennifer Crusie

Barking dogs occasionally bite, but laughing men hardly ever shoot. — Konrad Lorenz

Some lioness whelped you on a mountain rock
In Libya, or else you're Scylla's child
Whose womb's all barking dogs, for only a wild
Beast with the nature of a beast could mock
A desperate man making a last appeal
Down on his knees. Bitch heart too hard to feel! — Catullus

Here in the forest lay sullen, soot-blackened stones that were the remains of ruined hearths; in abandoned cemeteries were dark headstones that had already half sunk into the ground. Everything inanimate - stones, iron - was being swallowed by the earth, dissolving into it with the years, while green, vegetable life, in contrast, was bursting up from the earth. The boy found the silence over the cold hearths especially painful. And when he came back home, the smell of smoke from the kitchen, the barking of dogs, and the cackling of hens somehow seemed all the sweeter. — Vasily Grossman

I'm not looking for anything. I think all men are dogs, I honestly do. Every man starts barking sooner or later. — Octavia St. Laurent

It's painful to listen to the barking of dogs. — Nizar Qabbani

In the Twoleg nests around them, lights began to appear in the dark holes in the walls. Lionblaze heard a Twoleg shouting angrily, but the dogs went on barking and pounding at the fence. His belly lurched when he saw that the small brown-and-white dog had stuck its head through the gap and the wood around it was starting to splinter. The dark tabby she-cat darted forward and slashed her claws at the dog's nose. Yelping, it pulled back. — Erin Hunter

We were, to quote the proverb,
The one dog who barks at nothing answered by a thousand dogs barking at something ... — David Mitchell

A black pit bull barreled against the fence, jaws dripping with saliva, viciously barking like Old Yeller after the hydrophobia kicked in. — Chris Fabry

Villages and woods, meadows and chateaux, pass across the moving scene, out of which the whistling of locomotives throws sharp notes. These faint, piercing sounds, together with the yelping and barking of dogs, are the only noises that reach one through the depths of the upper air. The human voice cannot mount up into these boundless solitudes. Human beings look like ants along the white lines that are highways; and the rows of houses look like children's playthings. — Alberto Santos-Dumont

He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.
(writing about US President Warren G. Harding) — H.L. Mencken

At Lincoln Center there were always Young People's Concerts, and her class had once gone to one on a Saturday field trip. She had been to concerts before, of course, but it had always been at night, and with her mother. This matinee had a very different feeling to it.( ... ) It was wintertime, and the flu was swirling through the coatrooms of all the private schools of New York. In the darkness a child coughed from time to time, and another child coughed back in response, like two dogs tied in separate yards, barking to each other to keep company throughout the night. — Meg Wolitzer

Shadows on the wall Noises down the hall Life doesn't frighten me at all Bad dogs barking loud Big ghosts in a cloud Life doesn't frighten me at all. — Maya Angelou

Only the long melancholy call to prayer, or the wail of women over the dead, or the barking of dogs, breaks the silence which at sunset falls as a pall over Baghdad. — Isabella Bird

The night-crawlers had retired, but ripe chinaberries drummed on the roof when the wind stirred, and the darkness was desolate with the barking of distant dogs. — Harper Lee

A leaky faucet, a barking dog-those are things you tolerate. — Candace Gingrich-Jones

At last, I came to the Lost Dog's Home which my map told me marked teh turnoff to Shelly Beach.
You could hear some of the dogs barking, calling out for their owners to come and get them away from there ...
I hated going to those places because I always wanted to take all the dogs home or let them go free, even though I knew most of them would go straight out and be hit by a car or starve to death. I sometimes wished I could have a place where I could take those dogs and let them live. The Phantom had this sanctuary called Eden and all the animals there lived together, even tigers and baby deer, because they'd never learned it's kill or be killed. The maneaters ate fish out of the lagoon and the island was protected by the Bandar poison pygmies and by the piranha fish in the lagoon. I would have liked there to be such a place for pets who had been dumped of abandoned. They could feed the owners to the piranha. — Isobelle Carmody

While some dogs existed with the paranoia that the whole world infringed on their property rights and needed furious barking to be reminded of their place, this dog wanted only to find warm places to sleep and enough canned food to eat. Any atavistic memory of wolfdom had been bred out of his ancestors centuries ago. — Thomm Quackenbush

Colm was a good sleeper. But if there was one sound at night that should wake him, and any sensible man who loved his family, it was the barking of dogs.
The noise was coming from the village. It was not just one or two dogs, but surely every mangy cur and mongrel that lived there. Something was abroad, and in this time of the dying of the year, when fell creatures roamed the countryside as hunger began to bite, it was not likely to be anything good. — Duncan Harper

He'd missed dogs. Dogs added something that even people didn't, and one of the dogs was sitting by his feet, here in the darkness and the gentle rain. It wasn't bothered much about the rain or what might be out there on the unseen sea, but Mau was a warm body moving about in a sleeping world and might at any moment do something that called for runnung around and barking. Occasionally it looked up at him adoringly and made a slobbery gulping noise which possibly meant "Anything you say, boss! — Terry Pratchett

Human beings, Isao realized, could descend to communicating their feelings like dogs barking in the distance on a cold night. — Yukio Mishima

It does no good to bark at the television,
I said. I've tried it too. So he stopped. — Mary Oliver

It couldn't be an all-bad world, could it, not with birds who warble and call? Maybe that was the secret - to find the few things that made life just a fraction better, and to focus on those. Bird warbles. Peach fuzz. Puppies barking as if they're full grown dogs. Nothing great, certainly nothing to justify the rest of it, but enough to keep you going. — Shalom Auslander

Then someone within closed the door, shutting Norah out into the howling dust of the night. The clouds parted briefly to reveal the full moon's cold eye, then closed again. Wind seared over the pavilion's double roof, its voice rising to a shriek. Distantly, among the maze of walls, came the frenzied barking of hundreds of tiny dogs. As she drifted towards wakefulness, Norah could not tell whether it was the wind that she heard just at the end, or whether, within the dark hall, the girl had begun to scream. — Barbara Hambly

What does it matter if a few barking dogs snap at the heels of the weary travelers? ... The caravan moves on — Bruce R. McConkie

All I know is that my life is filled with little pockets of silence. When I put a record on the turntable, for example, there's a little interval-between the time the needle touches down on the record and the time the music actually starts-during which my heart refuses to beat. All I know is that between the rings of the telephone, between the touch of a button and the sound of the radio coming on, between the dimming of the lights at the cinema and the start of the film, between the lightning and the thunder, between the shout and the echo, between the lifting of a baton and the opening bars of a symphony, between the dropping of a stone and the plunk that comes back from the bottom of a well, between the ringing of the doorbell and the barking of the dogs I sometimes catch myself, involuntarily, listening for the sound of my mother's voice, still waiting for the tape to begin. — Robert Hellenga

Neighbours complaining about someone's dog making an awful racket. You could hardly blame the poor beast, its owner had died in her bed at least a fortnight before and there hadn't been much left of the old girl worth eating. — James Oswald

I met Keith Haring at SVA college where he was having an art show, later we had a group art show at the Mud Club in NYC. Keith owed me $50, so he gave me a large framed canvas with barking dogs that had large dicks. I painted over Keith's painting to paint flowers for my mom's living room. — Steve Kaufman

It is my belief that the writer, the free-lance author, should be and must be a critic of the society in which he lives. ... That is all I ask of the author. To be a hero, appoint himself a moral leader, wanted or not. I believe that words count, that writing matters, that poems, essays, and novels - in the long run - make a difference. If they do not, then in the words of my exemplar Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the writer's work is of no more importance than the barking of village dogs at night. — Edward Abbey

So the saying goes, there are two dogs barking over your shoulder, fear or determination. Which one wins? The one you feed. Never feed the dog who's afraid. — Katy Evans

I used to fear barking dogs. I would cringe and say to myself, 'Nice doggie please don't bite me I'll just go away,' but by that night I could look at them and think, I am your worst nightmare. Come closer and I will impale you upon my stick. The more I firmly visualized it, the more the dogs believed it. Now the tables had turned. Now the dogs feared me. — John Elder Robison

And now I realize Lindsay's not fearless. She's terrified. She's terrified that people will find out she's faking, bullshitting her way through life, pretending to have everything together when really she's just floundering like the rest of us. Lindsay, who will bite at you if you even look in her direction the wrong way, like on of those tiny attack dogs that are always barking and snapping in the air before they're jerked backward on the chains that keep them in one place. — Lauren Oliver

Feed the dogs. I hate to hear them barking like that. — Lillie Langtry

I often think about dogs when I think about work and retirement. There are many breeds of dog that just need to be working, and useful, or have a job of some kind, in order to be happy. Otherwise they are neurotically barking, scratching, or tearing up the sofa. A working dog needs to work. And I am a working dog. — Martha Sherrill

Closing his eyes again, standing there, glass in hand, he thought for a minute with a freezing detached almost amused calm of the dreadful night inevitably awaiting him whether he drank much more or not, his room shaking with daemonic orchestras, the snatches of fearful tumultuous sleep, interrupted by voices which were really dogs barking, or by his own name being continually repeated by imaginary parties arriving, the vicious shouting, the strumming, the slamming, the pounding, the battling with insolent archfiends, the avalanche breaking down the door, the proddings from under the bed, and always, outside, the cries, the wailing, the terrible music, the dark's spinets: he returned to the bar. — Malcolm Lowry

Though there are some notable exceptions, by and large the persistent ranting of the Warren Commission critics, some of whom were screaming the word 'conspiracy' before the fatal bullet had even come to rest, came to remind me, as H. L. Mencken said in a different context, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. — Vincent Bugliosi

Dogs have important jobs, like barking when the doorbell rings, but cats have no function in a house whatsoever. — W. Bruce Cameron

Even in the middle of barking dogs, you can hear the footsteps of a big revolution! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Sort of Coping"

Why is anyone in the world so terrible. Real catastrophe
and catastrophizing. If we only knew when it was going to
happen.

I saw you put your hands on the floor. Intimacy without
disturbances.
The scope here of memorization, planets. The history of children

sitting still. You are so cute in all your facebook photos.
When you moved to Portland I forgot we used to call you

Tumbleweed Tex. All those barking dogs, feathered hair.
We have something in common I never mention. I wish

I'd written it down and folded it into one of your piles
saying I want to read every one of these books! Do you think

you'll have read them all before the end of time. Did you go in
to see her when she was dead. Maybe you already knew. — Farrah Field

walls, the upturned cars, the barking dogs, the — Anthony Doerr

The novel should tell the truth, as I see the truth, or as the novelist persuades me to see it. And one more demand: I expect the novelist to aspire to improve the world ... As a novelist, I want to be more than one more dog barking at the other dogs barking at me. Not out of any foolish hope that one novelist, or all virtuous novelists in chorus, can make much of a difference for good, except in the long run, but out of the need to prevent the human world from relaxing into something worse. To maintain the tension between truth and falsity, beauty and ugliness, good and evil ... I believe the highest duty of the serious novelist is, whatever the means or technique, to be a critic of his society, to hold society to its own ideals, or if these ideals are unworthy, to suggest better ideals. — Edward Abbey

It is my belief that, as a rule, creatures of Happy's ilk - I am thinking here of canines and men both - more often run free than live caged, and it is in fact a world of mud and feces they desire, a world with no Art in it, or anyone like him, a place where there is no talk of books or God or the worlds beyond this world, a place where the only communication is the hysterical barking of starving and hate-filled dogs. — Joe Hill

The feeling of loathing had as yet no permanence or strength in the dog's soul. The newly awakened joy of life transformed every sensation into a great joke, into gaiety. Nimrod kept on barking, but the tone of it had changed imperceptibly, had become a parody of what it had been - an attempt to express the incredible wonder of that capital enterprise, life, so full of unexpected encounters, pleasures, and thrills. — Bruno Schulz

Villages that had been groaning beneath the iron weight of Stalin's hand breathed a sigh of relief. And the many millions confined in the camps rejoiced. Columns of prisoners were marching to work in deep darkness. The barking of guard dogs drowned out their voices. And suddenly, as if the northern lights had flashed the words through their ranks: "Stalin has died." As they marched on under guard, tens of thousands of prisoners passed the news on in a whisper: "He's croaked ... he's croaked ... " Repeated by thousand upon thousand of people, this whisper was like a wind. Over the polar lands it was still black night. But the ice in the Arctic Ocean had broken; you could now hear the roar of an ocean of voices. — Vasily Grossman

One minute she acts like she wants to be with me and I'm the one rejecting her. The next, she's got this barbed wire fence and barking dogs around her, like I can't even ask her the simplest questions." "And here I was assuming you didn't care about her." Stabbing his fingers through his hair, he groaned, "I don't!" "And you make it perfectly clear." Men. Idiots. — Jennifer Armintrout

There will always be folks who will talk, and the better you do in the world the more bad things they will say of you. Back there in the settlement you remember how the dogs used to run out and bark at our wagons?"
"Yes, ma."
"Did the wagons stop?"
"No, ma."
"Remember that, son. The dogs bark, but the wagons go on their way, and if you're going some place you haven't time to bother with barking dogs. — Louis L'Amour

Everything was fine with the Zen Lunatics, the nut wagon was too far away to hear us. But there was a wisdom in it all, as you'll see if you take a walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the street each with the lamplight of the living room, shining golden, and inside the little blue square of the television, each living family riveting its attention on probably one show; nobody talking; silence in the yards; dogs barking at you because you pass on human feet instead of on wheels. You'll see what I mean, when it begins to appear like everybody in the world is soon going to be thinking the same way and the Zen Lunatics have long joined dust, laughter on their dust lips. — Jack Kerouac

The barking hounds ran in and out of the creek, making slapping waves, turning the Georgia earth to mud under the longleaf pines. With the dogs at play, they were, for a lovely short time, naive boys on a glorious summer's day, lost in clamorous youth. — Jo-Ann Costa

As I've always said to Talyn, tough times never last. But tough Andarions. I learned that from watching you as a boy. Your parents, grandparents, and Keris treated you like shit and yet you never once spoke against them. You'd just lift your chin and carry on. 'Barking dogs don't bother me,' you used to say. 'Sooner or later, they reach the end of their yard and hit a fence. I'll keep going past it, and won't hear them anymore. — Sherrilyn Kenyon