dog
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.
Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir, by A. E. Hotchner (New York: Da Capo Press, 2005), 243.
I want to tell you that Rose was an extraordinary dog, bossy and demanding of attention, comforting in her very presence. Famously, she first appeared in the pages of Vogue fifteen years ago. I told the story of her puppyhood and our first meeting in a popular article that was later reprinted and anthologized. She sat on my shoulder in book-jacket photographs. When she was very dirty after a run, I would tell her to go get in the bathtub, and she would. She once scampered onto the headrest of my parked car, made a vertical leap through the open sunroof, and ran across the parking lot, into the grocery store, and up and down every aisle until she found me. She was loyal and brave and as smart as a treeful of owls. By explaining her talents and legions of virtues, though, I would not be making my point, which is that the death of my dog hit me harder than the deaths of many people I have known, and this can’t be explained away by saying how good she was. She was. But what I was feeling was something else entirely.
“The Sense of an Ending,” Vogue, Sept 2012.
Carlo died—
Would you instruct me now?
The Letters of Emily Dickinson vol 2, ed. by Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958), 449.
It is well to bear in mind that the truth about dogs is as elusive as the truth about man. You cannot put your finger on any quality and safely say, “This is doglike,” nor on any other quality and say, “This is not.” Dogs are individualists. They react to no set bylaws of behaviorism, they are guided by no strict precepts of conduct, they obey unvaryingly no system of instinct, they follow religiously no standard of bloodlines. I know an English bulldog with the manner of a Chesterfield. I know a beagle that can tell time. I know a Scottie that never has the slightest idea what time it is, and I miserably admit to the ownership of a high-bred French poodle that cools its soup by fanning it with a hat.
James Thurber, “Dogs I Have Scratched,” in The Dog Department: James Thurber on Hounds, Scotties, and Talking Poodles, ed. Michael J. Rosen (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), 56.
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.
“The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton,” in Scenes of a Clerical Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 16.
After school we were on our own, we had our friends, we went out on the cliffs with my dog, and we were free.
On how she spent time as a child, “Jane Goodall, Illustrated,” The New York Times, May 13, 2011.
…Innocent as my dog Patch,
Barking at his echo…
“Flying Scrolls,” in The Skylark: and Other Poems (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1959), 72.
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.
“Grief’s House,” in Unpacking the Boxes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008), 151.
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.
“Dog Training,” in One Man’s Meat (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1944), 199.
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.
“The Art of Fiction No. 45,” The Paris Review, No. 63, Fall 1975
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.
The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (New York: Biblo & Tannen Publishers, 1971), 239.
Considering her inordinate reclusiveness, who then walked Emily Dickinson’s huge dog?
Vanishing Point: A Novel (Washington, DC: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004), 150.