Two thousand miles, Rachel,” he said tightly, and I guessed that no, it didn’t violate the rules of whatever he was doing out here, because he sure wasn’t out here keeping the coven from attacking me. “I have eaten nothing but slop for two days and used facilities I wouldn’t let my dogs urinate in. And what about that couple in the RV outside Texas? I’ll never get that memory out of my head.” - Trent to Rachel

You run an ad claiming that [Mitt] Romney is an absolute unfeeling, mean-spirited animal hater because in the example they gave he put his dog on the roof of the station wagon during the family vacation. Why does it work? Why did it stick?And there is an answer.When they [Democrates] ran the ads about guy's wife dying with cancer...? Remember this? This was a serious series of ads, and it was deadly effective.

Brutes find out where their talents lie; A bear will not attempt to fly, A foundered horse will oft debate Before he tries a five barred gate. A dog by instinct turns aside Who sees the ditch too deep and wide, But man we find the only creature Who, led by folly, combats nature; Who, when she loudly cries-Forbear! With obstinacy fixes there; And where the genius least inclines, Absurdly bends his whole designs.

Society is infected with rude, cynical, restless, and frivolous persons who prey upon the rest, and whom no public opinion concentrated into good manners, forms accepted by the sense of all, can reach; the contradictors and railers at public and private tables, who are like terriers, who conceive it the duty of a dog of honor to growl at any passer-by, and do the honors of the house by barking him out of sight.

Every world has dogs or their equivalent, creatures that thrive on companionship, creatures that are of a high order of intelligence although not the highest and that therefore is simple enough in their wants and needs to remain innocent. The combination of their innocence and their intelligence allows them to serve as a bridge bewtween what is transient and what is eternal, between the finate and the infinate.

Do you want a list of what my dogs taught me? Patience, perspective, joy, loyalty, the simplicity and presence of their joy. That's a really great daily reminder, bad stuff happens, difficult stuff happens and you take them out onto the beach and you go "OK, now I see". You tell them the current political situation in the world and they go "should we go for a walk?" And you go, right, that's the correct answer.

Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans, and moderns generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or eventhe Elizabethan men. But what is that to the purpose? A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.

This guy from L.A. sits down next to me, and he says "you like baseball?" I said, "Oh, man, I love baseball." So he goes "Did you know that if Jesus had played ball, he'd have been the greatest ball player ever?" Like I'm gonna argue with that logic. So I sat there for a second, and then I said "did you know that if Babe Ruth had been the Messiah, the Catholics would have beer and hot dogs at Communion?" He left.

Is enjoyment the goal of life? Were it so, it would be a tremendous mistake to become a man at all. What man can enjoy a meal with more gusto than the dog or the cat ? Go to a menagerie and see the [wild animals] tearing the flesh from the bone. Go back and become a bird! . . . What a mistake then to become a man! Vain have been my years - hundreds of years - of struggle only to become the man of sense-enjoyments.

If you look at UFC champions: BJ Penn - terrifying! GSP - terrifying! Anderson Silva - terrifying! But I'm not terrifying. I am not the super-submission guy, I am not the one-punch KO guy, so I am not the most feared guy in the worldBut I will not quit, I will not break and I will fight you like a dog for every second of every round. I am not a super-talented guy, I'm just a dude who will fight you tooth and nail.

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.

The rooms of his apartment were full with the dog home again, convalescing. He was satisfied to know, even when she was out of sight, that somewhere in the apartment she was sleeping or eating or sitting watchfully. It was family, he guessed, more or less. Did most people want a house of living things at night, to know that in the dark around them other warm bodies slept? Such a house could even be the whole world.

Dogs are not like cats, who amusingly tolerate humans only until someone comes up with a tin opener that can be operated with a paw. Men made dogs, they took wolves and gave them human things - unnecessary intelligence, names, a desire to belong, and a twitching inferiority complex. All dogs dream wolf dreams, and know they're dreaming of biting their Maker. Every dog knows, deep in his heart, that he is a Bad Dog.

He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.

You need eyes that tell the dog who watches them what you are feeling toward it, even though the message may be hidden from the outside world. Above all, you nee telepathy so that the dog thinks with you. These things are not always born in people. They can be developed as any sense or gift can be developed. That is, providing the person wishes to develop them is honest in mind, because with animals you cannot cheat.

But nobody else ever romped with White Fang. He did not permit it. He stood on his dignity, and when they attempted it, his warning snarl and bristling mane were anything but playful. That he allowed the master these liberties was no reason that he should be a common dog, loving here and loving there, everybody's property for a romp and good time. He loved with single heart and refused to cheapen himself or his love.

Even thinking back to the age of ten, I found myself more interested in sex than the other children I knew. When I saw one dog jump on top of another dog, I wanted to watch. I found it exciting; I found it stimulating. I was really curious about nudity. I was really curious about breasts. I was really curious about what was under the clothes. I'd go into the hamper and look at my mother's underwear, her conical bras.

Wheaties was the big sponsor in those days (1940s). They sponsored almost all the baseball games in the majors and the minors. That was a lot of Wheaties. I think there were twenty-four boxes in a case and some of these guys were hitting twenty-five and thirty home runs a season. We had a dog in those days named Blue Grass and the players used to give us their Wheaties for him. Blue Grass loved Wheaties and so did I.

People are all exactly alike. There's no such thing as a race and barely such a thing as an ethnic group. If we were dogs, we'd be the same breed. George Bush and an Australian Aborigine have fewer differences than a Lhasa apso and a toy fox terrier. A Japanese raised in Riyadh would be an Arab. A Zulu raised in New Rochelle would be an orthodontist. People are all the same, though their circumstances differ terribly.

Reading, for me, is like this: consumptive, pleasing, calming, as much as edifying. It's how I feel after a good dinner. That's why I do it so often: It feels wonderful. The book is mind and I insert myself into it, cover it entire, ear my way through every last slash and dot. That's something you can do with a book, unlike television or movies or the Internet. You can eat it, or mark it, like a dog does on a hydrant.

He was an Afghan Hound name Kabul. Since him I have had other Afghan Hounds.... Perhaps I am looking for his ghost. He is the only one that I sometimes think about. Often, if he comes in to my mind when I am working, it alters what I do. The nose on the face I am drawing gets longer and sharper. The hair of the woman I am sketching gets longer and fluffy, resting against her cheeks like his ears rested against his head.

You're looking, moment by moment and scene by scene, how you can tell the most interesting story. So, we had this great short and we knew that we had a story about a boy and his dog. Because we had that pure emotional core, we could go on crazy tangents and always come back to Victor and Sparky. When I wrote in stuff like Weird Girl and the cat poop, Dutch Day and the windmill, it felt like it was part of Tim's universe.

Dogs have found themselves in an odd predicament by living with humans. In the wild, dogs don't need humans to achieve balance. They have a pack leader, work for food and travel with the pack. When we bring them into our world, we need to help them achieve balance by fulfilling their needs as nature intended. This takes exercise and discipline before affection, and always maintaining your calm, assertive pack leadership.

The so-called sexual revolution is not, as advertised, a liberation of sexual behavior but rather its reversal. In former days, even under Victoria, sexual intercourse was the natural end and culmination of heterosexual relations. Now one begins with genital overtures instead of a handshake, then waits to see what will turn up (e.g., might become friends later). Like dogs greeting each other nose to tail and tail to nose.

The dog that buried the bone which even a canine appetite could not manage, the squirrel that gathered nuts for a later feast, the bees that filled the comb with honey, the ants that laid up stores for a rainy day - these were among the first creators of civilization. It was they....who taught our ancestors the art of providing for tomorrow out of the surplus of today, or of preparing for winter in summer's time of plenty.

If rulers learn to undervalue the lives of their own subjects by the custom of war, how much more do they undervalue the lives of their enemies! As they learn to hear of the loss of five hundred or a thousand of their own men, with perhaps less feeling than they would hear of the death of a favorite horse or dog, so they learn to hear of the death of thousands after thousands on the side of the enemy with joy and exultation.

Dennis looked at the puppy in the window. We both did. It was the oddest thing. Normally, puppies in pet store windows sleep or pee or roll around on top of other dogs. This one ignored us its window-mates and was instead sitting with its nose pressed against the glass, looking at us with an extremely serious little expression on its face. An expression that seemed to me to be saying, "I am a sacred cow. Get out your wallet.

Play with your kids. Limit their TV time. Get outdoors and chase them around. Wrestle with them. Walk the dog. Go bike riding. The reality is that your kids are not stupid, and they know when they are overweight Start walking the dog after dinner instead of watching TV. You don't want them going on the Web to find ways to lose weight. That's when you'll find them eating tissue paper because they read that a supermodel did it.

A dog — a dog teaches us so much about love. Wordless, imperfect love; love that is constant, love that is simple goodness, love that forgives not only bad singing and embarrassments, but misunderstandings and harsh words. Love that sits and stays and stays and stays, until it finally becomes its own forever. Love, stronger than death. A dog is a four-legged reminder that love comes and time passes and then your heart breaks.

A man goes to the village to visit the wise man and he says to the wise man, “I feel like there are two dogs inside me. One dog is this positive, loving, kind, and gentle dog and then I have this angry, mean-spirited, and negative dog and they fight all the time. I don't know which is going to win.” The wise man thinks for a moment and he says, “I know which is going to win. The one you feed the most, so feed the positive dog.

It would perhaps not be amiss to point out that he had always tried to be a good dog. He had tried to do all the things his MAN and his WOMAN, and most of all his BOY, had asked or expected of him. He would have died for them, if that had been required. He had never wanted to kill anybody. He had been struck by something, possibly destiny, or fate, or only a degenerative nerve disease called rabies. Free will was not a factor.

[Hollywood] studios are handing out money to make independent films now, but they all want the same thing. They want the style and the deadpan delivery of RESERVOIR DOGS or FARGO and so they imitate those movies. They want PULP FICTION, but they get it all wrong! They get the detachment, but that's it. And then it's all about style, and in the end what do you learn about the characters? Nothing. You learn you wasted two hours.

In the olden days in England, you could be hung for stealing a sheep or a loaf of bread. However, if a sheep stole a loaf of bread and gave it to you, you would only be tried for receiving, a crime punishable by forty lashes with the cat or the dog, whichever was handy. If you stole a dog and were caught, you were punished with twelve rabbit punches, although it was hard to find rabbits big enough or strong enough to punch you.

Iʹve seen you too. Ozera. Crispin, right?ʺ ʺChristian,ʺ corrected Lissa. ʺRight.ʺ .... ʺSo what brings you and Christopher here?ʺ asked Blake. He finished a glass of something amber colored and set it down beside the new drink. ʺChristian,ʺ said Christian. .... Blake gave her puppy-dog eyes. ʺBut you just got here! I was hoping we could get to know each other.ʺ It went without saying what he meant by that. ʺOh. And Kreskin too.

I love to revel in philosophical matters-especially astronomy. I study astronomy more than any other foolishness there is. I am a perfect slave to it. I am at it all the time. I have got more smoked glass than clothes. I am as familiar with the stars as the comets are. I know all the facts and figures and have all the knowledge there is concerning them. I yelp astronomy like a sun-dog, and paw the constellations like Ursa Major.

I have learned, as has many another better writer, to summon inspiration to my call as soon as I begin my day's stint, and not to hang around waiting for it. Inspiration is merely a pretty phrase for the zest to work. And it can be cultivated by anyone who has the patience to try. Inspiration that will not come at its possessor's summons is like a dog that cannot be trained to obey. The sooner both are gotten rid of, the better.

Turn right up ahead," he directed. "It'll take us directly to my cottage." She did as he asked. "Does your cottage have a name?" "My Cottage." "I might have known," she muttered. He smirked. Quite a feat, in her opinion, since he looked sick as a dog. "I'm not kidding," he said. Sure enough, in another minute they pulled up in front of an elegant country house, complete with a small, unobtrusive sign in front reading, MY COTTAGE

Charity is in the heart of man, and righteousness in the path of men. Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it and who has lost his heart and does not know how to recover it. When people's dogs and chicks are lost they go out and look for them and yet the people who have lost their hearts do not go out and look for them. The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to look for the lost heart.

I think if human beings had genuine courage, they'd wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween. Wouldn't life be more interesting that way? And now that I think about it, why the heck don't they? Who made the rule that everybody has to dress like sheep 364 days of the year? Think of all the people you'd meet if they were in costume every day. People would be so much easier to talk to - like talking to dogs.

I believe that a healthy lifestyle isn't just a regular exercise routine or your eating habits, but a synergy of a healthy mind and body. To fuel my body, I am relentless about never eating anything that isn't of this Earth. I have no interest in putting stuff in my body that's made in a lab. Movement is vital. Whether it's running, cross training, hiking with the dogs, or walking the streets of New York, I am constantly active.

Winter near the shore is cold. The wind kicks up a salty mist and elephant seals come to shore to trumpet and rut and birth their pups. Retired people put sweaters on their lap dogs and drag them down the street on retractable leashes in a nightly parade of doggy humiliation. Surfers don their wetsuits against the chill of storm waves and white sharks adjust their diets to include shrink-wrapped dude-snacks on fiberglass crackers.

Then is courtesy a turncoat. But it is certain I am loved of all ladies, only you excepted: and I would I could find in my heart that I had not a hard heart; for, truly, I love none. Beatrice: A dear happiness to women: they would else have been troubled with a pernicious suitor. I thank God and my cold blood, I am of your humour for that: I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me. -Much Ado About Nothing

If we had the consciousness of a cat or a dog, we would have it in us to become perfect Zen masters. We could gnaw on a bone, take a nap, play with a spider until we killed it, get our litter just right, and be innocently and serenely present. Meaning would mean nothing to us, nor would we need it to mean anything. We would be free, and we would be spared. But, we are human beings, and we posses that odd duck – human consciousness.

I notice that when I feel the most disconnected, once I'm done blaming the moon and everything else, I can see that I am so mired in identification with form and ego and story and identity, and that if I want to, I can read some scripture or read some spiritual book or pray or meditate or sit in the sun or hang around the birds and the dogs, and get a real objective sense of what's really going on here. That usually softens things.

People, Reacher was certain about. Dogs were different. People had freedom of choice. If a man or a woman ran snarling toward him, they did so because they chose to. They were asking for whatever they got. His response was their problem. But dogs were different. No free will. Easily misled. It raised an ethical problem. Shooting a dog because it had been induced to do something unwise was not the sort of thing Reacher wanted to do.

The secret of Greek Art is its imitation of nature even to the minutest details; whereas the secret of Indian Art is to represent the ideal. The energy of the Greek painter is spent in perhaps painting a piece of flesh, and he is so successful that a dog is deluded into taking it to be a real bit of meat and so goes to bite it. Now, what glory is there in merely imitating nature? Why not place an actual bit of flesh before the dog?

Anybody who has ever owned a dog who barked when strangers came near its owner's property has experienced the essential continuity between animal territoriality and human property. Our domesticated cousins of the wolf know, instinctively, that property is no mere social convention or game, but a critically important evolved mechanism for the avoidance of violence. (This makes them smarter than a good many human political theorists.)

In language that is searing and lyrical, evocative and precise, this exceptional book thinks with the zombies, specters, felons, slaves, dogs, cadavers, and other entities that are the remnants of loss and dispossession in the law. Dogs and people are abundantly present here, even as the legal fictions they are made to inhabit are exposed with acid lucidity. These are hard histories made readable by Dayan's precious acts of writing.

The conclusion I have reached is that, above all, dogs are witnesses. They are allowed access to our most private moments. They are there when we think we are alone. Think of what they could tell us. They sit on the laps of presidents. They see acts of love and violence, quarrels and feuds, and the secret play of children. If they could tell us everything they have seen, all of the gaps of our lives would stitch themselves together.

We humans are in such a strange position—we are still animals whose behavior reflects that of our ancestors, yet we are unique—unlike any other animal on earth. Our distinctiveness separates us and makes it easy to forget where we came from. Perhaps dogs help us remember the depth of our roots, reminding us—the animals at the other end of the leash—that we may be special, but we are not alone. No wonder we call them our best friends.

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