“Now through the white orchard my little dog
romps, breaking the new snow
with wild feet.
Running here running there, excited,
hardly able to stop, he leaps, he spins
until the white snow is written upon
in large, exuberant letters,
a long sentence, expressing
the pleasures of the body in this world.

Oh, I could not have said it better myself.”

Mary Oliver

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“Poor old Black Dog. I miss him. In the early morning when I work, he’s not there on the kudu skin beside the typewriter; and in the afternoon when I swim, he’s not hunting lizards beside the pool; and in the evenings when I sit in my chair to read, his chin isn’t resting on my foot. I miss Black Dog as much as I miss any friend I ever lost.”

Ernest Hemingway

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“Carlo died—
Would you instruct me now?”

Emily Dickinson

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“I have all my life had a sympathy for mongrel ungainly dogs, who are nobody’s pets; and I would rather surprise one of them by a pat and a pleasant morsel, than meet the condescending advances of the loveliest Skye-terrier who has his cushion by my lady’s chair.”

George Eliot

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“After school we were on our own, we had our friends, we went out on the cliffs with my dog, and we were free.”

Jane Goodall

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“…Innocent as my dog Patch,
Barking at his echo…”

Ralph Hodgson

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“This house contained her, and I paced its rooms up and down. I moved furniture in the living room, undoing arrangements that accommodated her illness—her blue chair next to mine as we watched movies together. Walking up and down, often I howled. No one would hear me, deep in the country, to dial 911. My outbursts frightened our dog Gus, who wondered what he had done wrong. He searched for Jane everywhere and asked me to fetch her back. Several times each day, he brought me one of her shoes—slippers or sneakers—and set it on the floor beside me.”

Donald Hall

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“I’ve always tried out my material on my dogs first. You know, with Angel, he sits there and listens and I get the feeling he understands everything. But with Charley, I always felt he was just waiting to get a word in edgewise. Years ago, when my red setter chewed up the manuscript of Of Mice and Men, I said at the time that the dog must have been an excellent literary critic.”

John Steinbeck

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“You ask of my companions. Hills, sir, and the sundown, and a dog large as myself, that my father bought me. They are better than beings because they know, but do not tell.”

Emily Dickinson

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“The possession of a dog today is a different thing from the possession of a dog at the turn of the century, when one’s dog was fed on mashed potato and brown gravy and lived in a doghouse with an arched portal. Today a dog is fed on scraped beef and Vitamin B1 and lives in bed with you.”

E. B. White

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“Considering her inordinate reclusiveness, who then walked Emily Dickinson’s huge dog?”

David Markson

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“Happiness is a hound dog in the sun. We aren’t on Earth to be happy, but to experience incredible things.”

Marisha Pessl

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