Baxter The Dog Quotes

At least with pets, and for all I know, people too, intelligence and quick-wittedness have nothing to do with a talent for being loved, or being kind, nothing at all, less than nothing.

The girl ginned again, more cheerfully than ever. 'Bless you, miss! Baxter's the keeper; and when he finds strange dogs hunting about, he takes and shoots 'em. It's keeper's dooty, miss. I think that dog will die. Here's where he's been shot, ain't it? That's Baxter's doings, that is. Baxter's doings, miss, and Baxter's dooty.' It was almost wicked enough to wish that Baxter had shot the housemaid instead of the dog.

If it is true that there are books written to escape from the present moment, and its meanness and its sordidity, it is certainly true that readers are familiar with a corresponding mood. To draw the blinds and shut the door, to muffle the noises of the street and shade the glare and flicker of its lights—that is our desire. There is then a charm even in the look of the great volumes that have sunk, like the “Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia”, as if by their own weight down to the very bottom of the shelf. We like to feel that the present is not all; that other hands have been before us, smoothing the leather until the corners are rounded and blunt, turning the pages until they are yellow and dog’s-eared. We like to summon before us the ghosts of those old readers who have read their Arcadia from this very copy—Richard Porter, reading with the splendours of the Elizabethans in his eyes; Lucy Baxter, reading in the licentious days of the Restoration; Thos. Hake, still reading, though now the eighteenth century has dawned with a distinction that shows itself in the upright elegance of his signature. Each has read differently, with the insight and the blindness of his own generation. Our reading will be equally partial. In 1930 we shall miss a great deal that was obvious to 1655; we shall see some things that the eighteenth century ignored. But let us keep up the long succession of readers; let us in our turn bring the insight and the blindness of our own generation to bear upon the “Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia”, and so pass it on to our successors.

But something about Baxter made people uneasy and therefore compliant. It had always been that way, but never more so than now. With his prison tats and those cold eyes, Baxter was the alpha dog in pretty much any room he entered.

In the afterglow of the Big Bang, humans spread in waves across the universe, sprawling and brawling and breeding and dying and evolving. There were wars, there was love, there was life and death. Minds flowed together in great rivers of consciousness, or shattered in sparkling droplets. There was immortality to be had, of a sort, a continuity of identity through replication and confluence across billions upon billions of years. Everywhere they found life. Nowhere did they find mind—save what they brought with them or created—no other against which human advancement could be tested. With time, the stars died like candles. But humans fed on bloated gravitational fat, and achieved a power undreamed of in earlier ages. They learned of other universes from which theirs had evolved. Those earlier, simpler realities too were empty of mind, a branching tree of emptiness reaching deep into the hyperpast. It is impossible to understand what minds of that age—the peak of humankind, a species hundreds of billions of times older than humankind—were like. They did not seek to acquire, not to breed, not even to learn. They had nothing in common with us, their ancestors of the afterglow. Nothing but the will to survive. And even that was to be denied them by time. The universe aged: indifferent, harsh, hostile, and ultimately lethal. There was despair and loneliness. There was an age of war, an obliteration of trillion-year memories, a bonfire of identity. There was an age of suicide, as the finest of humanity chose self-destruction against further purposeless time and struggle. The great rivers of mind guttered and dried. But some persisted: just a tributary, the stubborn, still unwilling to yield to the darkness, to accept the increasing confines of a universe growing inexorably old. And, at last, they realized that this was wrong. It wasn't supposed to have been like this. Burning the last of the universe's resources, the final down-streamers—dogged, all but insane—reached to the deepest past. And—oh. Watch the Moon, Malenfant. Watch the Moon. It's starting—

Unless Baxter stood still it was impossible to distinguish if he was a dog, a cat, a hamster, or a racquetball. I mean I love dogs, but not dogs that are smaller than cats, that goes against everything God intended. I once saw Baxter get beat up by a rabbit. I’m not kidding you, a little white rabbit beat the piss out of him. He wouldn’t leave the house for a month.

Between This Woman Is Mine and Rise and Shine, Brennan gave a stirring performance as an outcast in Swamp Water (October 23, 1941). As Tom Keefer, unjustly accused of murder and taking refuge in a swamp, he becomes a second father to Ben Ragan (Dana Andrews), estranged from his crusty father, Thursday (Walter Huston). Ben happens on Keefer while searching the swamp for his dog, Trouble. The young man learns the ways of the swamp from Keefer, and he also realizes Keefer is innocent. Their bond is strengthened further when Ben falls in love with Keefer’s daughter, Julie (Anne Baxter).

Noelle looked around to see if she’d forgotten to put anything in the suitcases but came up with nothing. “What should we do till we leave?” she asked. “We have to keep them up.” The question was for Beamer, but Liesl answered. “Can we read Are You Sure You’ve Thought This Through?” Beamer, relieved for direction in these dark woods, lay down on the bed and wriggled in between the kids to read them what was currently their favorite book, which had been lying on his bedside table. It was called Are You Sure You’ve Thought This Through? and was about a little boy named Baxter who, on his way to school, encounters danger after danger and makes a bad decision at every turn. A van pulls up alongside Baxter as he’s walking to school and tells him that the driver’s dog is lost and could he get into the van and help him, since the dog loves kids? Baxter says yes and boards the van, and on the next page it says, Are You Sure You’ve Thought This Through? with no other picture or text, just stark white against dark, a wavy, terrified typeface. Nathan and Alyssa had sent it over as a Chanukah present with a note in Alyssa’s swirly handwriting: The boys loved this at Liesl’s age!

her, but he did not move. He was comfortable. “Oh my God, what has happened to my dog? He’s not allowed on couches!” She said this as if Max had done something really vile, like chained her dog to a tree. It felt a little as if she was taking aim at his dog skills, and he didn’t like it. He knew how to handle dogs, for fuck’s sake. “There is nothing wrong with dogs on couches,” he said defensively. “And there is nothing wrong with Dog TV. Why do I feel like I’m being pressed to defend my very good care of your dog before I even get to know where my dog is? I am happy to talk about couch philosophy, if you could just—” “Baxter, get down from there!” she commanded again. Baxter shifted his gaze to her as if he’d just noticed her, found her uninteresting, and then shifted his gaze back to the TV. She lunged forward