Quotes & Sayings About Dead Dog

As the sun went down, I saw a solitary boatman disporting on the smooth lake. The falling dews seemed to strain and purify the air, and I was soothed with an infinite stillness. I got the world, as it were, by the nape of the neck, and held it under in the tide of its own events, till it was drowned, and then I let it go down stream like a dead dog. Vast hollow chambers of silence stretched away on every side, and my being expanded in proportion, and filled them. Then first could I appreciate sound, and find it musical. — Henry David Thoreau

45,000 sections of reinforced concrete - three tons each.
Nearly 300 watchtowers.
Over 250 dog runs.
Twenty bunkers.
Sixty five miles of anti-vehicle trenches - signal wire, barbed wire, beds of nails.
Over 11,000 armed guards.
A death strip of sand, well-raked to reveal footprints.
200 ordinary people shot dead following attempts to escape the communist regime.
96 miles of concrete wall.

Not your typical holiday destination.

JF Kennedy said the Berlin Wall was a better option than a war. In TDTL, the Anglo-German Bishop family from the pebbledashed English suburb of Oaking argue about this - among other - notions while driving to Cold War Berlin, through all the border checks, with a plan to visit both sides of it. — Joanna Campbell

Armies have spent a lot of time and effort training their soldiers not to think of the enemy as human beings. It's so much easier to kill them if you think of them as dangerous animals. The trouble is, war isn't about killing. It's about getting the enemy to stop resisting your will. Like training a dog not to bite. Punishing him leaves you with a beaten dog. Killing him is a permanent solution, but you've got no dog. If you can understand why he's biting and remove the conditions that make him bite, sometimes that can solve the problem as well. The dog isn't dead. He isn't even your enemy. — Orson Scott Card

a small few actually able to do those things of which men whisper - these few could call demons and the dead, could kill with a curse or heal with strange potions. One of these men had been a creature the gunslinger believed to be a demon himself, a creature that pretended to be a man and called itself Flagg. He had seen him only briefly, and that had been near the end, as chaos and the final crash approached his land. Hot on his heels had come two young men who looked desperate and yet grim, men named Dennis and Thomas. These three had crossed only a tiny part of what had been a confused and confusing time in the gunslinger's life, but he would never forget seeing Flagg change a man who had irritated him into a howling dog. He remembered that well enough. — Stephen King

Next day on returning I found him dead in the snow with his head on the sill of the door - the door of his puppyhood's days; my dog to the last in his heart of hearts - it was my help he sought, and vainly sought, in the hour of his bitter extremity. — Ernest Thompson Seton

I not only weaken the opposition, I'm going to make them dead ... and if anyone is strong enough to try to hold a demonstration, I will beat all those dogs and put them in a cage. — Hun Sen

The day of death is better than the day of birth, a live dog is better than a dead lion, and the grave is better than poverty. — N.J. Dawood

No man would ever use both hands to hold a cup of tea, unless he was one day's march from the South Pole, with one chum dead in the snow, dogs all eaten and six fingers about to drop off. And even then he would look around the empty tent to check, in case anybody thought it was girly. — Allison Pearson

Hey, I'm going to Super Dog for a quick bite and to pass along a message from a dead guy to his girlfriend. You should come with me."
"I can't go with you."
"Is it because of my questionable morals?"
"No, it's because it's three o'clock in the afternoon and I have to pick up Amber from school."
"Oh, right. So the morals thing doesn't bother you? — Darynda Jones

Cats are the ultimate narcissists. You can tell this because of all the time they spend on personal grooming. Dogs aren't like this. dog's idea of personal grooming is to roll in a dead fish. — James P. Gorman

Of all the Hathaway sisters," Cam said equably, "Beatrix is the one most suited to choose her own husband. I trust her judgment."
Beatrix gave him a brilliant smile. "Thank you, Cam."
"What are you thinking?" Leo demanded of his brother-in-law. "You can't trust Beatrix's judgment."
"Why not?"
"She's too young," Leo said.
"I'm twenty-three," Beatrix protested. "In dog years I'd be dead. — Lisa Kleypas

Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine. — Malcolm Lowry

After a while I started to think of that as an image of something that went a lot deeper than the dead dog, which is you can't bring back anything to life. — Alan Alda

I suppose he'll die soon. I'm expecting it, like you do for a dog that's seventeen. There's no way to know how I'll react. He'll have faced his own placid death and slipped without a sound inside himself. Mostly, I imagine I'll crouch there at the door, fall onto him, and cry hard into the stench of his fur. I'll wait for him to wake up, but he won't. I'll bury him. I'll carry him outside, feeling his warmth turn to cold as the horizon frays and falls down in my backyard. For now, though, he's okay. I can see him breathing. He just smells like he's dead. — Markus Zusak

You a low down dog is what's wrong. It's time to leave you and enter into the creation. And your dead body just the welcome mat I need. — Alice Walker

Bucolic peace is not my ambience, and the giving of tea parties is by no means my favorite amusement. In fact, I would prefer to be pursued across the desert by a band of savage Dervishes brandishing spears and howling for my blood. I would rather be chased up a tree by a mad dog, or face a mummy risen from its grave. I would rather be threatened by knives, pistols, poisonous snakes, and the curse of a long-dead king. Lest I be accused of exaggeration, ... Emerson once remarked that if I should encounter a band of Dervishes, five minutes of my nagging would unquestionably inspire even the mildest of them to massacre me ... — Elizabeth Peters

It was all a mistake," he pleaded, standing out of his ship, his wife slumped behind him in the deeps of the hold, like a dead woman. "I came to Mars like any honest enterprising businessman. I took some surplus material from a rocket that crashed and I built me the finest little stand you ever saw right there on that land by the crossroads - you know where it is. You've got to admit it's a good job of building." Sam laughed, staring around. "And that Martian - I know he was a friend of yours - came. His death was an accident, I assure you. All I wanted to do was have a hot-dog stand, the only one on Mars, the first and most important one. You understand how it is? I was going to serve the best darned hot dogs there, with chili and onions and orange juice." The — Ray Bradbury

There is no way to overpower, outrun, or outsmart the mad dog of hopelessness because it's simply more vicious than I. The only thing to do is let it attack, go limp in its jaws, and be shaken. But I notice one promising pattern. If I play dead, it will eventually let me go. I start thinking of the dog of hopelessness as an obstacle that will reappear on every curve of the spiral staircase. He'll always be there waiting and snarling, but with every go-round, I'll be more confident and less fearful. Eventually, I'll learn the tricks that will allow me to breeze right past him. But the mad dog of hopelessness will always be there. My spiral staircase of progress means that my pain will be both behind me and in front of me, every damn day. I'll never be "over it," but I vow to be stronger each time I face it. Maybe the pain won't change, but I will. I keep climbing. — Glennon Doyle Melton

No, this was Philly. Drunks here boo Santa and get in more trouble than a dog with an Easter basket, and like the dog, they usually end up either sick or dead. Ah yes, another lovely eve in the big city. — Kym Grosso

If a superhero knocks over a building, and there are 5,000 people in the building that we can presume are now dead, does it matter? Because they're not people we know. But if one dog we like gets run over by a car, it's the worst thing we've ever seen. I totally understand where that visceral reaction comes from. I have that same reaction. — D. B. Weiss

Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message 'He is Dead'.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good. — W. H. Auden

Everyday for Lucy's entire dog life Jane had sliced a banana for breakfast and had miraculously dropped one of the perfect disks on to the floor where it sat for an instant before being gobbled up. Every morning Lucy's prayers were answered, confirming her belief that God was old and clumsy and smelt like roses and lived in the kitchen.
But no more.
Lucy knew her God was dead. And she now knew the miracle wasn't the banana, it was the hand that offered the banana. — Louise Penny

Eve: "She had big plans for me. Kind of a pet, I imagine. Like William. Her little trained dog. And with you dead, she figured I'd inherit all your goodies. You're not going to do that to me are you?"
Roarke: "What, die?"
Eve: "Leave me all this stuff."
Roarke: "Only you would be annoyed by that. — J.D. Robb

Arya lifted her gaze from the dead man and his dead dog. Jaqen H'ghar was leaning up against the side of the Wailing Tower. When he saw her looking, he lifted a hand to his face and laid two fingers casually against his cheek. — George R R Martin

I'm fucking the grave, I thought, I'm bringing the dead back to life ... — Charles Bukowski

That's a big trunk," James said, as we jammed in the leathery old case that looked so much like the black heart of some leviathan. "It fits a tuba, three suitcases, a dead dog, and a garment bag almost perfectly."
"That's just what they used to say in the ads," I said ... — Michael Chabon

Only yesterday an express train tore up a whole flock of sheep not far from here, over forty dead animals, flung through the air like cotton-wool balls, the good shepherd fallen asleep drunk somewhere, the dog in the field alone, not a hope. Now the shepherd has to bear joint responsibility for the whole loss, or don't you think he bears a responsibility, dear television audience, write and let us know what you think, it's your views that count. — Elfriede Jelinek

The Shadow is what people are hunting throughout the tale. Or else it can dog the hero, refusing to leave him alone. It's a potent force that bewitches as much as it torments. It can lead to hell or heaven. It's the hollow forever inside you, never filled. It's everything in life you can't touch, hold on to, so ephemeral and painful it makes you gasp. You might even glimpse it for a few seconds before it's gone. Yet the image will live with you. You'll never forget it as long as you live. It's what you're terrified of and paradoxically what you're looking for. We are nothing without our shadows. They give our otherwise pale, blinding world definition. They allow us to see what's right in front of us. Yet they'll haunt us until we're dead. — Marisha Pessl

I know well enough that there have been dogs so loving that they have thrown themselves into the same grave with the dead bodies of their masters; others have stayed upon their masters' graves without stirring a moment from them, and have voluntarily starved themselves to death, refusing to touch the food that was brought them. — Miguel De Cervantes

The past is discredited because it is not modern. Not to be modern is the great sin. So, perhaps, it is. But every one has, in his day, been modern. And surely even modernity is a poor thing beside immortality. Since we must all die, is it not perhaps better to be a dead lion than a living dog? — Katharine Fullerton Gerould

If I were an athlete I'd be past my prime. If I were a dog I'd be dead. Thirty ... shit. — Jonathan Tropper

A dog's idea of personal grooming is to roll on a dead fish. — James P. Gorman

This month is fit for little.
The dead ripen in the grapeleaves.
A red tongue is among us.
Mother, keep out of my barnyard,
I am becoming another.
Dog-head, devourer:
Feed me the berries of dark.
The lids won't shut. Time
Unwinds from the great umbilicus of the sun
its endless glitter.
I must swallow it all.
Lady, who are those others in the moons' vat-
Sleepdrunk, their limbs at odds?
In this light the blood is black.
Tell me my name. — Sylvia Plath

Upon returning from the store, he would put the meat into the freezer, hide his favorite fruits in the bathroom cabinet, and stuff everything else into the crisper. It was, of course, too late for crisp, but he took the refrigerator drawer at its word, insisting that it was capable of reviving the dead and returning them, hale and vibrant, to the prime of their lives. Subjected to a few days in his beloved crisper, a carrot would become as pale and soft as a flaccid penis.
"Hey," he'd say. "Somebody ought to eat this before it goes bad."

He'd take a bite, and the rest of us would wince at the unnatural silence. Too weak to resist, the carrot quietly surrendered to the force of his jaws. An overcooked hot dog would have made more noise. Wiping the juice from his lips, he would insist that this was the best carrot he'd ever eaten.
"You guys don't know what you're missing."
I think we had a pretty good idea. — David Sedaris

After Death nothing is, and nothing, death,
The utmost limit of a gasp of breath.
Let the ambitious zealot lay aside
His hopes of heaven, whose faith is but his pride;
Let slavish souls lay by their fear
Nor be concerned which way nor where
After this life they shall be hurled.
Dead, we become the lumber of the world,
And to that mass of matter shall be swept
Where things destroyed with things unborn are kept.
Devouring time swallows us whole.
Impartial death confounds body and soul.
For Hell and the foul fiend that rules
God's everlasting fiery jails
(Devised by rogues, dreaded by fools),
With his grim, grisly dog that keeps the door,
Are senseless stories, idle tales,
Dreams, whimseys, and no more. — John Wilmot

We learned sexual technique from our dog. He taught how to beg, and he taught my wife how to roll over and play dead. — Rodney Dangerfield

There's no reason to keep a piece of furniture in your house that is so sacred and rare that you can't put your feet up on it and a dog can't jump up on it. Likewise, a book that sits on a shelf like a piece of porcelain, only to be admired, never to be read again, is a dead book. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Praying without fervency is like hunting with a dead dog. — Charles Spurgeon

Lindsey and I would lie down on the floor underneath it. I would pretend to be the knight that was pictured, and Holiday was the faithful dog curled up at his feet. Lindsey would be the wife he'd left behind. It always dissolved into giggles no matter how solemn the start. Lindsey would tell the dead knight that a wife had to move on, that she couldn't be trapped for the rest of her life by a man who was frozen in time ...
"You're dead, knight," she would say. "Time to move on. — Alice Sebold

Atticus "What's this religion going to be called?"
Oberon "Poochism"
A:"and the name of this holy writ I will be typing for you?"
O:"The dead flea scrolls: A Sirius Prophecy. — Kevin Hearne

There's a very fine line between underacting and not acting at all. And not acting is what a lot of actors are guilty of. It amazes me how some of these little numbers with dreamy looks and a dead pan are getting away wit it. I'd hate to see them on stage with a dog act. — Joan Blondell

My background is in painting but in school in the sixties, like many artists of that time, I believed that painting was dead. I began to work in collaboration with other artists in the creation of performances and installation works. Soon after, I started making video and photographic works and in the process became fascinated with the media itself. Before long I was setting things up just for the camera. In l970 I got a dog and he turned out to be very interested in video and photography as well. — William Wegman

A man who offers to cook after he's seen you trying to freeze a dead dog has to be at least a little bit keen. — Rosen Trevithick

I'm dead, Makina said to herself when everything lurched: a man with a cane was crossing the street, a dull groan suddenly surged through the asphalt, the man stood still as if waiting for someone to repeat the question and then the earth opened up beneath his feet: it swallowed the man, and with him a car and a dog, all the oxygen around and even the screams of passers-by. I'm dead, Makina said to herself, and hardly had she said it than her whole body began to contest that verdict and she flailed her feet frantically backward, each step mere inches from the sinkhole, until the precipice settled into a perfect circle and Makina was saved. Slippery bitch of a city, she said to herself. Always about to sink back into the the cellar. — Yuri Herrera

For one who is chosen to be among all the living, there is hope. For a living dog is better than a dead lion. While there is breath, there is hope. Even in hopeless situations, there is hope that the situation changes for the better. — Gina Burgess

Tomorrow was my second chance to make things right but it never came. I'm sorry I never treasured the time we had for those regrets I take the blame. You gave everything you had. I took without giving back." Sed paused in his song, feeling ridiculous for singing it to her while they made love.
"Baby, you realize this song is about Trey's dead dog, don't you? — Olivia Cunning

So I say this. Speak of them. Speak of those that died. Speak of all those who ever died
in all the world's history, in its wars, and long-lost days. Speak of those who met their deaths in Glencoe, in snow
not of their deaths, but of their lives before them. Not of how they died, but of how they bent to pat a dog's head, or what ballads they could sing, or what their skin was like by their eyes when they smiled, or which weather was their weather
for it keeps them living. It stops them being dead.
To do this
to speak or write of them
puts breath back in their mouths. It lifts them up from their earthy beds ... brings them forth, and they stand by the side of the one who speaks of them; they walk out of the pages of those who write them down. From the realm, they smile upon us. All the dead people
only, they are not dead. — Susan Fletcher

little sun little moon little dog
and a little to eat and a little to love
and a little to live for

in a little room
filled with little
mice
who gnaw and dance and run while I sleep
waiting for a little death
in the middle of a little morning

in a little city
in a little state
my little mother dead
my little father dead
in a little cemetery somewhere.

I have only
a little time
to tell you this:

watch out for
little death when he comes running

but like all the billions of little deaths
it will finally mean nothing and everything:

all your little tears burning like the dove,
wasted. — Charles Bukowski

Ballet in September used to be dead as a dodo. Now, with City Ballet's ingenious decision to give us four weeks of repertory in the early fall, having cut down on the relentlessly long spring season when dancers, critics and audiences droop on the vine, we wake up after the dog days of August with something to look at. — Robert Gottlieb

The Dordogne in 1984 was the nadir. Diarrhea, moths like flying hamsters, the blowtorch heat. Awake at three in the morning on a damp and lumpy mattress. Then the storm. Like someone hammering sheets of tin. Lightning so bright it came through the pillow. In the morning sixty, seventy dead frogs turning slowly in the pool. And at the far end something larger and furrier, a cat perhaps, or the Franzetti's dog, which Katie was poking with a snorkel. (pg 53) — Mark Haddon

I have wished you dead and myself dead. How could it be otherwise. I have broken into you like a burglar. And you've set your dogs on me. And a pile of broken sticks. A child could kick. I have climbed you like a monument, gasoing, For the exercise and the view, And leaned over the railing at the top ... Strong and warm, the summer wind. — Alicia Ostriker

She whipped her tentacles away from his fingers decapitating the dead lobster-dog and its body fell from the ceiling fan. — Athena Villaverde

Rain falling on water ... Ah, yes ... When he was a little lad he'd pretended that the raindrops splashing in the running gutters were soldiers. Millions of soldiers. And the bubbles that sometimes went floating by were men on horseback. Right now he couldn't remember what the occasional dead dog had been. Some kind of siege weapon, possibly. — Terry Pratchett

I lay down beside Carlo in his bassinet. I must have been there five or six hours, my arm around his neck, and would have stayed another six if Pa-pa hadn't started tugging at me. He would tell people how I had all the strength of a steam engine, and that he couldn't pull me loose until I heard Ma-am cry.
"Em," she moaned, "you cannot stay in this room forever with a dead dog. — Jerome Charyn

But destiny grips us and, the next morning, in a soft winter rain, we buried the dead, paid silver coins, and then walked southward. We were a boy on the edge of being a grown man, a girl, and a dog, and we were going to nowhere. — Bernard Cornwell

Better a live dog than a dead lion. — Steven Barnes

For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

No man is the boss of his own house, but he can make up for it, he thinks, by making a dog play dead. — W.C. Fields

As it turned out, the sachem had been dead wrong.
The Europes neither fled nor died out. In fact, said the old women in charge of the children, he had apologized for this error in prophecy and admitted that however many collapsed from ignorance or disease more would always come.
They would come with languages that sounded like a dog bark; with a childish hunger for animal fur. They would forever fence land, ship whole trees to faraway countries, take any woman for quick pleasure, ruin soil, befoul sacred place and worship a dull, unimaginative god.
They let their hogs browse the ocean shore turning it into dunes of sand where nothing green can ever grow again. Cut loose from the earth's soul, they insisted on purchase of its soil, and like all orphans they were insatiable.
It was their destiny to chew up the world and spit out a horribleness that would destroy all primary peoples. — Toni Morrison

Better a live dog than a dead prince — Philip K. Dick

What's the difference between a dead dog in the road and a dead lawyer in the road? There are skid marks in front of the dog. — Barbara Delinsky

The glee of it. The ecstasy of It. I can't speak about this It because I know no word. It is just there, It is always there, like death in life. In this instant I know that something terrible is rising that must be seized and turned back upon itself before it twists outward into violence. But that knowing always comes too late, a wild unraveling is under way and I am caught up in it like a coyote seen late one afternoon in an Arkansas tornado-a toy dog spinning skyward, struck white by a ray of sun against black clouds, then black, then white, then gone and lost forever. The wind dies. A dead stillness. Mirror water. That ecstasy that shivered every nerve replaced by the precise knowing that what this self perpetrated is as much a part of the universal will as erupting lava that subsides once more into the inner earth. — Peter Matthiessen

The dead dog had come more than a hundred miles to find its master.
[Mademoiselle Cocotte] — Guy De Maupassant

I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead. The stars were shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful; and I heard an owl, away off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die; — Mark Twain

Poets have tried to describe Ankh-Morpork. They have failed. Perhaps it's the sheer zestful vitality of the place, or maybe it's just that a city with a million inhabitants and no sewers is rather robust for poets, who prefer daffodils and no wonder. So let's just say that Ankh-Morpork is as full of life as an old cheese on a hot day, as loud as a curse in a cathedral, as bright as an oil slick, as colourful as a bruise and as full of activity, industry, bustle and sheer exuberant busyness as a dead dog on a termite mound. — Terry Pratchett

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where St Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stock of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him crying: 'Stetson!
You, who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,
Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!
You! hypocrite lecteur!-mon semblable,-mon frere! — T. S. Eliot

There was no air; only the dead, still night fired by the dog days of August. Not a breath. I had to suck in the same air I exhaled, cupping it in my hands before it escaped. I felt it, in and out, less each time ... until it was so thin it slipped through my fingers forever. I mean, forever. — Juan Rulfo

I believe in life. I believe it to be something that is eternal, powerful and spread throughout the universe -- something like gravity. There are many such energies. Once we are able to detect life it will boggle our minds for centuries to come. The shear magnitude will rapture many, and destroy others, but we're not there yet. We can say something is alive, or dead, but not if life is there or not. Perhaps because it is too quiet, maybe because it is so loud we can hear nothing else, but mainly -- I believe -- because we haven't bothered to listen yet. -- from the Black Dog — Glenn Hefley

Some days are good, and some days are bad, and some days are the days you get a dead dog in the mail. They can't all be winners. — Jenny Lawson

We stand dead still and we listen to the night. The city drones. An owl hoots and a cat howls and a dog barks and a siren wails.
We let the stars shine into us. — David Almond

If your mind has space, then in that space there is silence - and from that silence everything else comes, for then you can listen, you can pay attention without resistance. That is why it is very important to have space in the mind. If the mind is not overcrowded, not ceaselessly occupied, then it can listen to that dog barking, to the sound of a train crossing the distant bridge, and also be fully aware of what is being said by a person talking here. Then the mind is a living thing, it is not dead. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

And now my old dog is dead, and another I had after him, and my parents are dead, and that first world, that old house, is sold and lost, and the books I gathered there lost, or sold- but more books bought, and in another place, board by board and stone by stone, like a house, a true life built, and all because I was steadfast about one or two things: loving foxes, and poems, the blank piece of paper, and my own energy- and mostly the shimmering shoulders of the world that shrug carelessly over the fate of any individual that they may, the better, keep the Niles and Amazons flowing. — Mary Oliver

I have it on good report that not only does Ambrose have a tiny, tiny penis, but he can only become aroused when in the presence of a dead dog, a painting of the Duke of Gibea, and a shirtless galley drummer. — Patrick Rothfuss

Go away," he said. "Go away. I wish you had never come here. I wish I had never heard of the Light and the Dark, and your damned old Merriman and his rhymes. If I had your golden harp now I would throw it in the sea. I am not a part of your stupid quest anymore, I don't care what happens to it. And Cafall was never a part of it either, or a part of your pretty pattern. He was my dog, and I loved him more than anything in the world, and now he is dead. Go away. — Susan Cooper

You're over there in the corner either thinking about the dead dog or whatever, you're bringing up your personal life and you need the space, and then somebody throws you a joke. Especially if it's an emotional scene, you don't want the joke. — Marcia Gay Harden

And not only did he learn by experience, but instincts long dead became alive again. The domesticated generations fell from him. In vague ways he remembered back to the youth of the breed, to the time the wild dogs ranged in packs through the primeval forest and killed their meat as they ran it down. — Jack London

But he had always believed in fighting for the underdog, against the top dog. He had learned it, not from The Home, or The School, or The Church, but from that fourth and other great moulder of social conscience, The Movies. From all those movies that had begun to come out when Roosevelt went in.
He had been a kid back then, a kid who had not been on the bum yet, but he was raised up on all those movies that they made then, the ones that were between '32 and '37 and had not yet degenerated into commercial imitations of themselves like the Dead End Kid perpetual series that we have now. He had grown up with them, those movies like the every first Dead End, like Winternet, like Grapes Of Wrath, like Dust Be My Destiny, and those other movies starring John Garfield and the Lane girls, and the on-the-bum and prison pictures starring James Cagney and George Raft and Henry Fonda. — James Jones

He who does not understand that a dead lion is more alive than a living dog will remain a dog. — Maimonides

A Bluesman hates to be told what to do. Authority rankles him, inspires his rebellion, and plays to his need to self-destruct. A Bluesman doesn't take to having a boss unless he's on a chain gang (for the chain gang boss ranks below only a mean old woman and a sweet young thing in the hierarchy of the Blues Muse, followed closely by bad liquor, a dead dog, and the Man). — Christopher Moore

I've risen from the dead. Though sometimes, when I wake up in the morning, I feel like I've died. I swear I'm aging in dog years. But no, I'm not dead. It's funny how stuff like that gets started. — Tony Stewart

Strike the dog dead, it's but a critic! — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Because getting a headset sweaty was kind of small potatoes compared to the fact that I was brandishing a machete at large raptors, while considering the pros and cons of hiring a pimp to dig up our dead dog. — Jenny Lawson

My father sits at the head of a table before the carcass of an enormous American turkey. What he is ashamed of is the one act of decency I have yet encountered in all the tales of our family's past. A young boy with a dead father and a dead friend bends down before a country dog and feeds it his butter sandwich. And I know that sandwich. Because he has made it for me. Two slices of that dark, unbleached Russian bread, the kind that tastes of badly managed soil and a peasant's indifference to death. On top of it, the creamiest, deadliest of American butter, slathered in thick feta-like hunks. And on top of that cloves of garlic, the garlic that is to give me strength, that is to clear my lungs of asthmatic gunk, and make of me a real garlic-eating strong man. At a table in Leningrad, and a table in deepest Queens, New York, the ridiculous garlic crunches beneath our teeth as we sit across from each other, the garlic obliterating whatever else we have eaten, and making us one. — Gary Shteyngart

will you please explain how you can cry for a dead dog yet belong to a society of fanatics that urges death on human beings who happen to be Jews? Explain to me the logic of it. — Bernard Malamud

one look his fears of a dog-fighting ring were valid. Blood was spattered around a makeshift wooden ring. Chains were piled up in a corner. He could see where the cages had been placed in the grass by the indents, but they were gone now. A dead cat was dangling from a tree branch. — Kathleen Brooks

Coco?" I whispered, standing still, hardly able to believe it. "Oh - Coco?" "It is impossible to imagine," a voice behind seemed to be saying from a great distance away, "how the dog could have reached this spot. For three days he has been immovable in his kennel." I dropped on my knees, and took his paw in my hand. He gave the faintest wag of his tail, and tried to raise his head; but it fell back again, and he could only look at me. For an instant, for the briefest instant, we looked at each other, and while we looked his eyes glazed. "Coco - I've come back. Darling - I'll never leave you any more - - " I don't know why I said these things. I knew he was dead, and that no calls, no lamentations, no love could ever reach him again. Sliding down on to the stone flags beside him, I laid my head on his and wept in an agony of bitter grief. Now indeed I was left alone in the world. Even my dog was gone. — Elizabeth Von Arnim

Aubade with a Broken Neck The first night you don't come home summer rains shake the clematis. I bury the dead moth I found in our bed, scratch up a rutabaga and eat it rough with dirt. The dog finds me and presents between his gentle teeth a twitching nightjar. In her panic, she sings in his mouth. He gives me her pain like a gift, and I take it. I hear the cries of her young, greedy with need, expecting her return, but I don't let her go until I get into the house. I read the auspices - the way she flutters against the wallpaper's moldy roses means all can be lost. How she skims the ceiling means a storm approaches. You should see her in the beginnings of her fear, rushing at the starless window, her body a dart, her body the arrow of longing, aimed, as all desperate things are, to crash not into the object of desire, but into the darkness behind it. — Traci Brimhall

And the fierce wind is an echo of angry childhood and of a very scared boy looking out the window - remembering my dead dog outside by the wounded house as the gray Texas dust gradually covered her up - and thinking: It isnt fair! Why cant dogs go to Heaven? — John Rechy

Mee and Ow sat in the shade of a mango tree and were doing their make-up. Both of them wore gloves that reached all the way up to their elbows, to keep the tropical sun off their skins. They looked briefly at Maier, with the curiosity usually reserved for a passing dog. It was too early for professional enthusiasm. — Tom Vater

He remembered a dog - the only living thing they found in the entire village - curled around the body of a dead child. Caramon stopped to pet the small dog. The animal cringed, then licked the big man's hand. It then licked the child's cold face, looking up at the warrior hopefully, expecting this human to make everything all right, to make his little playmate run and laugh again. — Tracy Hickman

Every dog on the face of the earth wants me dead. — Bill Bryson

If your dog should be dead, I'm gonna love you instead. — George Harrison

We didn't domesticate cats. They domesticated themselves. But not totally, you know? You take a good look at any house cat, and you can tell there's eventually going to be a day when it goes back wild, you know? When it reverts to its true nature. You fall over and die in a house with your dog, and your dog will lie down beside your dead body, maybe right on top of it, and starve to death. But a house cat will feast on your eyes as soon as its stomach starts growling. — Sherman Alexie

Oh! to be a child again. My only treasures, bits of shell and stone and glass. To love nothing but maple sugar. To fear nothing but a big dog. To go to sleep without dreading the morrow. To wake up with a shout. Not to have seen a dead face. Not to dread a living one. To be able to believe. — Fanny Fern

The dog was dead. There was a garden fork sticking out of the dog ... I decided the dog was probably killed with the fork because I could not see any other wounds in the dog and I do not think you would stick a garden fork into a dog after it had died for some other reason, like cancer, for example, or a road accident. But I could not be certain about this. — Mark Haddon

A living dog's better than a dead lion. — Elizabeth Bowen

Everything we do is escapism, because we'll all be dead and everything we do is completely meaningless. Why brush your teeth? Why not be in the park with the bums passing a short dog? Why pay taxes, why get educated? Of course literature is an escape. You have to fill the hours. — T.C. Boyle

The moment I do any puppy dog acting, I think the joke is dead. It's in the truth of how I play it, and the real painful honesty that I approach my performance with. — Jason Gann

In a dog's world, only three states existed: "now," "in a while," and "forever." If someone left, he was gone "forever," and when he returned they rejoiced as much as if he were back from the dead precisely because he'd been gone "forever. — Mercedes Lackey

What I say is, don't go playing unless you can win. Only sit down to chess with idiots, only kick a dog what's dead already, and don't love a lady unless she loves you first. — N.D. Wilson