Sick Dog Quotes

1. I’m lonely so I do lonely things 2. Loving you was like going to war; I never came back the same. 3. You hate women, just like your father and his father, so it runs in your blood. 4. I was wandering the derelict car park of your heart looking for a ride home. 5. You’re a ghost town I’m too patriotic to leave. 6. I stay because you’re the beginning of the dream I want to remember. 7. I didn’t call him back because he likes his girls voiceless. 8. It’s not that he wants to be a liar; it’s just that he doesn’t know the truth. 9. I couldn’t love you, you were a small war. 10. We covered the smell of loss with jokes. 11. I didn’t want to fail at love like our parents. 12. You made the nomad in me build a house and stay. 13. I’m not a dog. 14. We were trying to prove our blood wrong. 15. I was still lonely so I did even lonelier things. 16. Yes, I’m insecure, but so was my mother and her mother. 17. No, he loves me he just makes me cry a lot. 18. He knows all of my secrets and still wants to kiss me. 19. You were too cruel to love for a long time. 20. It just didn’t work out. 21. My dad walked out one afternoon and never came back. 22. I can’t sleep because I can still taste him in my mouth. 23. I cut him out at the root, he was my favorite tree, rotting, threatening the foundations of my home. 24. The women in my family die waiting. 25. Because I didn’t want to die waiting for you. 26. I had to leave, I felt lonely when he held me. 27. You’re the song I rewind until I know all the words and I feel sick. 28. He sent me a text that said “I love you so bad.” 29. His heart wasn’t as beautiful as his smile 30. We emotionally manipulated one another until we thought it was love. 31. Forgive me, I was lonely so I chose you. 32. I’m a lover without a lover. 33. I’m lovely and lonely. 34. I belong deeply to myself .

She liked anything orange: leaves; some moons; marigolds; chrysanthemums; cheese; pumpkin, both in pie and out; orange juice; marmalade. Orange is bright and demanding. You can't ignore orange things. She once saw an orange parrot in the pet store and had never wanted anything so much in her life. She would have named it Halloween and fed it butterscotch. Her mother said butterscotch would make a bird sick and, besides, the dog would certainly eat it up. September never spoke to the dog again — on principle.

For the pride of trace and trail was his, and sick unto death, he could not bear that another dog should do his work.

If I had a dog that was sick as often as you are, I'd put it down," he observed kindly.

A friend called the other day. 'How are you?' she said. The sun was shining, the sky a merciless blue. It was only eleven in the morning but I had been awake since three twenty. I was in bed because, as usual, I could think of nowhere else to go. I said that I was feeling low. Low is the depressive's euphemism for despair. She said: 'How can you be depressed on a day like this?' I wanted to say: 'If I had flu, would you ask me how I could be sick on a day like this?

Rooney dropped to her knees. ‘Georgia, I am never going to stop being your friend. And I don’t mean that in the boring average meaning of ‘friend’ where we stop talking regularly when we’re twenty-five because we’ve both met nice young men and gone off to have babies, and only get to meet up twice a year. I mean I’m going to pester you to buy a house next door to me when we’re forty-five and have finally saved up enough for our deposits. I mean I’m going to be crashing round yours every night for dinner because you know I can’t fucking cook to save my life, and if I’ve got kids and a spouse, they’ll probably come round with me, because otherwise they’ll be living on chicken nuggets and chips. I mean I’m going to be the one bringing you soup when you text me that you’re sick and can’t get out of bed and ferrying you to the doctor’s even when you don’t want to go because you feel guilty about using the NHS when you just have a stomach bug. I mean we’re gonna knock down the fence between our gardens so we have one big garden, and we can both get a dog and take turns looking after it. I mean I’m going to be here, annoying you, until we’re old ladies, sitting in the same care home, talking about putting on a Shakespeare because we’re all old and bored as shit.

The face of "evil" is always the face of total need. A dope fiend is a man in total need of dope. Beyond a certain frequency need knows absolutely no limit or control. In the words of total need: "Wouldn't you?" Yes you would. You would lie, cheat, inform on your friends, steal, do anything to satisfy total need. Because you would be in a state of total sickness, total possession, and not in a position to act in any other way. Dope fiends are sick people who cannot act other than they do. A rabid dog cannot choose but bite.

people need me. I fill them. if they can't see me for awhile the get desperate, they get sick. but if I see them too often I get sick. it's hard to feed without getting fed.

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

She still had her bad days, no question, when the black dog of depression sniffed her out and settled its crushing weight on her chest and breathed its pungent dog breath in her face. On those days she called in sick to the IT shop where, most days, she untangled tangled networks for a song. On those days she pulled down the shades and ran dark for twelve or twenty-four or seventy-two hours, however long it took for the black dog to go on home to its dark master.

I am trying to see things in perspective. My dog wants a bite of my peanut butter chocolate chip bagel. I know she cannot have this, because chocolate makes dogs very sick. My dog does not understand this. She pouts and wraps herself around my leg like a scarf and purrs and tries to convince me to give her just a tiny bit. When I do not give in, she eventually gives up and lays in the corner, under the piano, drooping and sad. I hope the universe has my best interest in mind like I have my dog’s. When I want something with my whole being, and the universe withholds it from me, I hope the universe thinks to herself: "Silly girl. She thinks this is what she wants, but she does not understand how it will hurt.

She was forcing it with her scorn, the kiss she gave me, the hard curl of her lips, the mockery of her eyes, until I was like a man made of wood and there was no feeling within me except terror and a fear of her, a sense that her beauty was too much, that she was so much more beautiful than I, deeper rooted than I. She made me a stranger unto myself, she was all of those calm nights and tall eucalyptus trees, the desert stars, that land and sky, that fog outside, and I had come there with no purpose save to be a mere writer, to get money, to make a name for myself and all that piffle. She was so much finer than I, so much more honest, that I was sick of myself and I could not look at her warm eyes, I suppressed the shiver brought on by her brown arms around my neck and the long fingers in my hair. I did not kiss her. She kissed me, author of The Little Dog Laughed. Then she took my wrist with her two hands. She pressed her lips into the palm of my hand. She placed my hand upon her bosom between her breasts. She turned her lips towards my face and waited. And Arturo Bandini, the great author dipped deep into his colourful imagination, romantic Arturo Bandini, just chock-full of clever phrases, and he said, weakly, kittenishly, 'Hello.

One of the problems with all of this is that not all narratives are equal. Imagine, to take a silly example, that someone told you story after story extolling the virtues of eating dog shit. You've been told these stories since you were a child. You believe them. You eat dog shit hotdogs, dog shit ice cream, General Tso's dog shit. Sooner or later, if you are exposed to some other foods, you might figure out that dog shit really doesn't taste good. Or if you cling too tightly to these stories (or if your enculturation is so strong that dog shit actually does taste good to you), the diet might make you sick or kill you. To make this example a little less silly, substitute the word pesticides for dog shit. Or, for that matter, substitute Big Mac, Whopper, or Coca Cola.

First came bright Spirits, not the Spirits of men, who danced and scattered flowers. Then, on the left and right, at each side of the forest avenue, came youthful shapes, boys upon one hand, and girls upon the other. If I could remember their singing and write down the notes, no man who read that score would ever grow sick or old. Between them went musicians: and after these a lady in whose honour all this was being done. I cannot now remember whether she was naked or clothed. If she were naked, then it must have been the almost visible penumbra of her courtesy and joy which produces in my memory the illusion of a great and shining train that followed her across the happy grass. If she were clothed, then the illusion of nakedness is doubtless due to the clarity with which her inmost spirit shone through the clothes. For clothes in that country are not a disguise: the spiritual body lives along each thread and turns them into living organs. A robe or a crown is there as much one of the wearer's features as a lip or an eye. But I have forgotten. And only partly do I remember the unbearable beauty of her face. “Is it?...is it?” I whispered to my guide. “Not at all,” said he. “It's someone ye'll never have heard of. Her name on earth was Sarah Smith and she lived at Golders Green.” “She seems to be...well, a person of particular importance?” “Aye. She is one of the great ones. Ye have heard that fame in this country and fame on Earth are two quite different things.” “And who are these gigantic people...look! They're like emeralds...who are dancing and throwing flowers before here?” “Haven't ye read your Milton? A thousand liveried angels lackey her.” “And who are all these young men and women on each side?” “They are her sons and daughters.” “She must have had a very large family, Sir.” “Every young man or boy that met her became her son – even if it was only the boy that brought the meat to her back door. Every girl that met her was her daughter.” “Isn't that a bit hard on their own parents?” “No. There are those that steal other people's children. But her motherhood was of a different kind. Those on whom it fell went back to their natural parents loving them more. Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer, to their own wives.” “And how...but hullo! What are all these animals? A cat-two cats-dozens of cats. And all those dogs...why, I can't count them. And the birds. And the horses.” “They are her beasts.” “Did she keep a sort of zoo? I mean, this is a bit too much.” “Every beast and bird that came near her had its place in her love. In her they became themselves. And now the abundance of life she has in Christ from the Father flows over into them.” I looked at my Teacher in amazement. “Yes,” he said. “It is like when you throw a stone into a pool, and the concentric waves spread out further and further. Who knows where it will end? Redeemed humanity is still young, it has hardly come to its full strength. But already there is joy enough int the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life.

So they were pen pals now, Emma composing long, intense letters crammed with jokes and underlining, forced banter and barely concealed longing; two-thousand-word acts of love on air-mail paper. Letters, like compilation tapes, were really vehicles for unexpressed emotions and she was clearly putting far too much time and energy into them. In return, Dexter sent her postcards with insufficient postage: ‘Amsterdam is MAD’, ‘Barcelona INSANE’, ‘Dublin ROCKS. Sick as DOG this morning.’ As a travel writer, he was no Bruce Chatwin, but still she would slip the postcards in the pocket of a heavy coat on long soulful walks on Ilkley Moor, searching for some hidden meaning in ‘VENICE COMPLETELY FLOODED!!!!

Come on,” he said, and then dragged me toward the house. I stopped when we got to the porch. “What is that smell?” Ryan sniffed his shirt and with a smile said, “Armani. You like it?” “Not you,” I said. “It smells like someone is frying up dog vomit in your house.” This took Ryan by surprise. I guess it was pretty random. “You’re really sick sometimes, Baker,” Ryan said. “You know that?

Success" If you want a thing bad enough To go out and fight for it, Work day and night for it, Give up your time and your peace and your sleep for it If only desire of it Makes you quite mad enough Never to tire of it, Makes you hold all other things tawdry and cheap for it If life seems all empty and useless without it And all that you scheme and you dream is about it, If gladly you'll sweat for it, Fret for it, Plan for it, Lose all your terror of God or man for it, If you'll simply go after that thing that you want. With all your capacity, Strength and sagacity, Faith, hope and confidence, stern pertinacity, If neither cold poverty, famished and gaunt, Nor sickness nor pain Of body or brain Can turn you away from the thing that you want, If dogged and grim you besiege and beset it, You'll get it!

Through neglect, ignorance, or inability, the new intellectual Borgias cram hairballs down our throats and refuse us the convulsion that could make us well. They have forgotten, if they ever knew, the ancient knowledge that only by being truly sick can one regain health. Even beasts know when it is good and proper to throw up. Teach me how to be sick then, in the right time and place, so that I may again walk in the fields and with the wise and smiling dogs know enough to chew sweet grass.

More than 95 percent of the world’s bacteria are harmless to humans. Many are extremely beneficial. Disinfectants have no place in a normal household. They are appropriate only if a family member is sick or the dog poops on the carpet.

I cooked his meals. I cleaned his clothes. I looked after him every weekend. I look after him when he was ill. I took him to the doctor. I worried myself sick everytime he wandered off somewhere at night. I went to school every time he got into a fight. And you? What? You wrote him some fucking letters.

Today, for the mass of humanity, science and technology embody 'miracle, mystery, and authority'. Science promises that the most ancient human fantasies will at last be realized. Sickness and ageing will be abolished; scarcity and poverty will be no more; the species will become immortal. Like Christianity in the past, the modern cult of science lives on the hope of miracles. But to think that science can transform the human lot is to believe in magic. Time retorts to the illusions of humanism with the reality: frail, deranged, undelivered humanity. Even as it enables poverty to be diminished and sickness to be alleviated, science will be used to refine tyranny and perfect the art of war.

I KNEW IT WAS OVER when tonight you couldn't make the phone ring when you used to make the sun rise when trees used to throw themselves in front of you to be paper for love letters that was how i knew i had to do it swaddle the kids we never had against january's cold slice bundle them in winter clothes they never needed so i could drop them off at my mom's even though she lives on the other side of the country and at this late west coast hour is assuredly east coast sleeping peacefully her house was lit like a candle the way homes should be warm and golden and home and the kids ran in and jumped at the bichon frise named lucky that she never had they hugged the dog it wriggled and the kids were happy yours and mine the ones we never had and my mom was grand maternal, which is to say, with style that only comes when you've seen enough to know grace like when to pretend it's christmas or a birthday so she lit her voice with tiny lights and pretended she didn't see me crying as i drove away to the hotel connected to the bar where i ordered the cheapest whisky they had just because it shares your first name because they don't make a whisky called baby and i only thought what i got was what i ordered i toasted the hangover inevitable as sun that used to rise in your name i toasted the carnivals we never went to and the things you never won for me the ferris wheels we never kissed on and all the dreams between us that sat there like balloons on a carney's board waiting to explode with passion but slowly deflated hung slave under the pin- prick of a tack hung heads down like lovers when it doesn't work, like me at last call after too many cheap too many sweet too much whisky makes me sick, like the smell of cheap, like the smell of the dead like the cheap, dead flowers you never sent that i never threw out of the window of a car i never really owned

Now, I learned a long time ago how to be quiet on the outside while I'm freaking on the inside. How to turn away like I don't see all the things that need to be seen, just to keep peace. How to lie low and act like I want nothing, expect nothing, and hope for nothing so I don't become more trouble than I'm worth. I'm five months short of eighteen and I know how to be cursed and ignored and left behind, how to swallow a thousand tears and ignore a thousand delibarate cruelties, but it's two in the morning on New Year's Eve and I'm mad and scared and bone tired and really, really sick of acting like I'm grateful to be staying on a hairy, sagging, dog-stained couch in a junky, mildewed trailer with a fat, dangerous, volatile drunk who sweats stale beer and wallows in his own wastewater, and who doesn't think there's one thing wrong with taking his crap life out on his dog, who comes bellying back for forgiveness every single time, no matter how rotten the treatment-

O.K." "Gee I'm glad." "Me too. I'm so sick of hot dogs and beer and apple pie with cheese on the side I could heave it all in the river." "You'll love it, Frank. We'll get a place up in the mountains, where it's cool, and then, after I get my act ready, we can go all over the world with it. Go as we please, do as we please, and have plenty of money to spend. Have you got a little bit of gypsy in you?" "Gypsy? I had rings in my ears when I was born.

Remember those dogs I was talking about? The cues? While I was watching TV, I missed a few. Take a look: Steven is smiling, almost laughing. After all the punishment he’s received from my sister over the years, he’s developed quite the sadistic streak when it comes to other people getting their asses handed to them. Then there’s Matthew. God only knows what kind of sick and depraved penalties Delores has inflicted on that poor bastard, because he just looks scared. Kate, on the other hand, is staring at my hand like it’s a cockroach. That she wants to squash. And then she gets an idea—a wonderful, awful idea. If you look hard enough, you can see the light bulb go on above her head. She smiles and leaves the room. I missed all this the first time.

The belly’s a shameless dog, there’s nothing worse.      Always insisting, pressing, it never lets us forget —      destroyed as I am, my heart racked with sadness,      sick with anguish, still it keeps demanding,      ‘Eat, drink!’ It blots out all the memory      of my pain, commanding, ‘Fill me up!

Life bullies us son, but God don't. He had good reasons for fixin' it where if'n you git too sick or too hurt to live, why, you can die, same as a sick chicken. I've knowed a few really sick chickens to git well, and lots a-folks git well thet nobody ever thought to see out a-bed agin cept in a coffin. Still and all, common sense tells you this much: everwhat makes a wheel run over a track will make it run over a boy if'n he's in the way. If'n you'd a got kilt, it'd mean you jest didn't move fast enough, like a rabbit that gits caught by a hound dog... When it comes to prayin' we got it all over the other animals, but we ain't no different when it comes to livin' and dyin'. If'n you give God the credit when somebody don't die, you go'n blame Him when they do die? Call it His Will? Ever noticed we git well all the time and don't die but once't? Thet has to mean God always wants us to live if'n we can.

My sweetheart, my love, my love, my love—do you know what—all the happiness of the world, the riches, power and adventures, all the promises of religions, all the enchantment of nature and even human fame are not worth your two letters. It was a night of horror, terrible anguish, when I imagined that your undelivered letter, stuck at some unknown post office, was being destroyed like a sick little stray dog . . . But today it arrived—and now it seems to me that in the mailbox where it was lying, in the sack where it was shaking, all the other letters absorbed, just by touching it, your unique charm and that that day all Germans received strange wonderful letters—letters that had gone mad because they had touched your handwriting. The thought that you exist is so divinely blissful in itself that it is ridiculous to talk about the everyday sadness of separation—a week’s, ten days’—what does it matter? since my whole life belongs to you. I wake at night and know that you are together with me,—I sense your sweet long legs, your neck through your hair, your trembling eyelashes—and then such happiness, such simmering bliss follows me in my dreams that I simply suffocate . . .

I had survived the work gangs in the ghetto. Baked bread under cover of night. Hidden in a pigeon coop. Had a midnight bar mitzvah in the basement of an abandoned building. I had watched my parents be taken away to their deaths, had avoided Amon Goeth and his dogs, had survived the salt mines of Wieliczka and the sick games of Trzebinia. I had done so much to live, and now, here, the Nazis were going to take all that away with their furnace! I started to cry, the first tears I had shed since Moshe died. Why had I worked so hard to survive if it was always going to end like this? If I had known, I wouldn't have bothered. I would have let them kill me back in the ghetto. It would have been easier that way. All that I had done was for nothing.

How could he hate the Jews and yet feel sick when they were attacked? Louis hated peasants, too, apparently, and yet he had no problem sitting beside Jeanne - hoisting her in the air and dancing even. Jacob tried to turn this over in his head, around and around, like the cartwheels beneath him. But after a while, he gave up. People were too strange to understand, he decided. They were like life. And also that cheese. Too many things at once.

What is the price of Experience? Do men buy it for a song? Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price Of all that a man hath, his house, his wife, his children Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy And in the wither'd field where the farmer ploughs for bread in vain It is an easy thing to triumph in the summer's sun And in the vintage and to sing on the waggon loaded with corn It is an easy thing to talk of patience to the afflicted To speak the laws of prudence to the homeless wanderer To listen to the hungry raven's cry in wintry season When the red blood is fill'd with wine and with the marrow of lambs It is an easy thing to laugh at wrathful elements To hear the dog howl at the wintry door, the ox in the slaughterhouse moan; To see a god on every wind and a blessing on every blast To hear sounds of love in the thunderstorm that destroys our enemies' house; To rejoice in the blight that covers his field and the sickness that cuts off his children While our olive and vine sing and laugh round our door and our children bring fruits and flowers Then the groan and the dolour are quite forgotten and the slave grinding at the mill And the captive in chains and the poor in the prison and the soldier in the field When the shatter'd bone hath laid him groaning among the happier dead It is an easy thing to rejoice in the tents of prosperity: Thus could I sing and thus rejoice: but it is not so with me.

You can find something funny in anything! I'm sick as a dog and falling to bits, but I'll give up joking only after I give up the ghost! my last gasp! The proof, here, with only an eighth of a glimmer of light, things oozing out of my asshole, my armpits, and the elbows, too, blood coming out of the eyes, from the soupy mess of my grave, me whistling a tune, that's what you'll hear! A regular blackbird!

His own way to a sick man is what grass is to a sick dog.

She stood for a long time, breathing in and breathing in, the scent of the trees and dogs and night flowers and water, because this was the best thing, it was what she wanted, to be outside in the night by herself. She wasn't sick any longer.

After I changed a crew, I would watch them scrabbling and crying in the sty, falling over each other, stupid with their horror. They hated it all, their newly voluptuous flesh, their delicate split trotters, their swollen bellies dragging in the earth’s muck. It was a humiliation, a debasement. They were sick with longing for their hands, those appendages men use to mitigate the world. Come, I would say to them, it’s not that bad. You should appreciate a pig’s advantages. Mud-slick and swift, they are hard to catch. Low to the ground, they cannot easily be knocked over. They are not like dogs, they do not need your love. They can thrive anywhere, on anything, scraps and trash. They look witless and dull, which lulls their enemies, but they are clever. They will remember your face. They never listened. The truth is, men make terrible pigs.

When you're sick, who does the shopping or takes you to the doctor? Who do you talk to when you are upset?" In other words, who provides you with emotional and practical support? Some patients gave us surprising answers: "my dog" or "my therapist" – or "nobody".

He is my other eyes that can see above the clouds; my other ears that hear above the winds. He is the part of me that can reach out into the sea. He has told me a thousand times over that I am his reason for being; by the way he rests against my leg; by the way he thumps his tail at my smallest smile; by the way he shows his hurt when I leave without taking him. (I think it makes him sick with worry when he is not along to care for me.) When I am wrong, he is delighted to forgive. When I am angry, he clowns to make me smile. When I am happy, he is joy unbounded. When I am a fool, he ignores it. When I succeed, he brags. Without him, I am only another man. With him, I am all-powerful. He is loyalty itself. He has taught me the meaning of devotion. With him, I know a secret comfort and a private peace. He has brought me understanding where before I was ignorant. His head on my knee can heal my human hurts. His presence by my side is protection against my fears of dark and unknown things. He has promised to wait for me... whenever... wherever - in case I need him. And I expect I will - as I always have. He is just my dog.

I’m Holden Maxwell,” Max answered immediately, in other words before I could. “I own the house Nina rented. There was a mix up, I had to be in town on personal business and Slim didn’t tell Nina. She showed up at the house and I was there. Lucky I was. She was sick as a dog, lapsed into a fever so bad she was delirious for two days and I was worried I’d have to take her to the hospital. The fever broke and since then things have advanced between us. We’ve gotten to know each other, we both like what we know and, bottom line, you didn’t take care of what was yours. Now, as Nina has explained, you’ve lost it, I found it and it’s mine.” Excerpt From: Ashley, Kristen. “The Gamble.” Kristen Ashley. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.

The Americans as a nation are killing themselves with their vices and high living. As much as a man ought to eat in half an hour they swallow in three minutes gulping down their food like the [dog] under the table which when a chunk of meat is thrown down to it swallows it before you can say 'twice.' If you want a reform carry out the advice I have just given you. Dispense with your multitudinous dishes, and, depend upon it, you will do much towards preserving your families from sickness, disease and death.

I'd rather get sick from eating too many doggie treats, than get sick from eating none at all. -Kilo (my dog)

On the morning of our second day, we were strolling down the Champs-Elysées when a bird shit on his head. ‘Did you know a bird’s shit on your head?’ I asked a block or two later. Instinctively Katz put a hand to his head, looked at it in horror – he was always something of a sissy where excrement was concerned; I once saw him running through Greenwood Park in Des Moines like the figure in Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’ just because he had inadvertently probed some dog shit with the tip of his finger – and with only a mumbled ‘Wait here’ walked with ramrod stiffness in the direction of our hotel. When he reappeared twenty minutes later he smelled overpoweringly of Brut aftershave and his hair was plastered down like a third-rate Spanish gigolo’s, but he appeared to have regained his composure. ‘I’m ready now,’ he announced. Almost immediately another bird shit on his head. Only this time it really shit. I don’t want to get too graphic, in case you’re snacking or anything, but if you can imagine a pot of yoghurt upended onto his scalp, I think you’ll get the picture. ‘Gosh, Steve, that was one sick bird,’ I observed helpfully. Katz was literally speechless. Without a word he turned and walked stiffly back to the hotel, ignoring the turning heads of passers-by. He was gone for nearly an hour. When at last he returned, he was wearing a windcheater with the hood up. ‘Just don’t say a word,’ he warned me and strode past. He never really warmed to Paris after that.

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.

Whenever you are sick, it's nice to know there are dogs who are willing to spend as long as it takes to lick you better.

A bald man made an attempt on Constant's life with a hot dog. Stabbed at the window glass with it. Splayed the bun. Broke the frankfurter. Left a sickly sunburst of mustard and relish.

Critics do not have the satisfaction of working on things that actually exist, like sick dogs or dental cavities. So they are tempted to pluck a virtue out of necessity and claim that they toil in an altogether superior realm, that of the imagination. This implies, rather oddly, that things which do not exist are inevitably more precious than those that do, which is a fairly devastating comment on the latter. What kind of a world is it in which possibility is unquestionably preferable to actuality?

I am made to sow the thistle for wheat; the nettle for a nourishing dainty I have planted a false oath in the earth, it has brought forth a poison tree I have chosen the serpent for a councellor & the dog for a schoolmaster to my children I have blotted out from light & living the dove & the nightingale And I have caused the earthworm to beg from door to door I have taught the thief a secret path into the house of the just I have taught pale artifice to spread his nets upon the morning My heavens are brass my earth is iron my moon a clod of clay My sun a pestilence burning at noon & a vapor of death in night What is the price of Experience do men buy it for a song Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No it is bought with the price Of all that a man hath his house his wife his children Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy And in the withered field where the farmer plows for bread in vain It is an easy thing to triumph in the summers sun And in the vintage & to sing on the waggon loaded with corn It is an easy thing to talk of patience to the afflicted To speak the laws of prudence to the houseless wanderer To listen to the hungry ravens cry in wintry season When the red blood is filled with wine & with the marrow of lambs It is an easy thing to laugh at wrathful elements To hear a dog howl at the wintry door, the ox in the slaughter house moan To see a god on every wind & a blessing on every blast To hear the sounds of love in the thunder storm that destroys our enemies house To rejoice in the blight that covers his field, & the sickness that cuts off his children While our olive & vine sing & laugh round our door & our children bring fruits and flowers Then the groans & the dolor are quite forgotten & the slave grinding at the mill And the captive in chains & the poor in the prison, & the soldier in the field When the shattered bone hath laid him groaning among the happier dead It is an easy thing to rejoice in the tents of prosperity Thus could I sing & thus rejoice, but it is not so with me!

So many stories lived behind my eyes. I carried the people I hurt, the lies I told, my sick relationship with food, wherever I went. My mind was rarely grounded in the moment. My past was heavy and constant; my thoughts wouldn’t leave me alone. But when I was with the shelter dogs, I didn’t have anything to hide. Sometimes what existed behind my eyes fell away. I wasn’t bulimic or unlovable or fat or a liar. I was a part of life again. I was an observer, and to more than just the dark cyclical patterns of the mind—here was the strong, sturdy presence of another—the breath moving in and out of Angel’s chest, the beating of her heart, the force of life moving through her and through me.

She made me a stranger unto myself, she was all of those calm nights and tall eucalyptus trees, the desert stars, that land and sky, that fog outside, and I had come there with no purpose save to be a mere writer, to get money, to make a name for myself and all that piffle. She was so much finer than I, so much more honest, that I was sick of myself and I could not look at her warm eyes, I suppressed the shiver brought on by her brown arms around my neck and the long fingers in my hair. I did not kiss her. She kissed me, author of The Little Dog Laughed.

TRIBUTE TO A DOG The one absolutely unselfish friend that man can have in this selfish world, the one that never deserts him, the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous, is his dog. A man’s dog stands by him in prosperity and in poverty, in health and in sickness. He will sleep on the cold ground, where the wintry winds blow and the snow drives fiercely, if only he may be near his master’s side. He will kiss the hand that has no food to offer; he will lick the wounds and sores that come in encounter with the roughness of the world. He guards the sleep of his pauper master as if he were a prince. When all other friends desert, he remains. When riches take wing and reputation falls to pieces, he is as constant in his love as the sun in its journey through the heavens.

Dogs can tell how many times a person's heart beats, how many breaths they've taken, whether they're sick, whether they're dying. Dogs can find the secrets their people don't know, tip them over, spill them onto the ground, roll in them

I was thinking about people," said Polynesia." People make me sick. They think they're so wonderful. The world has been going on now for thousands of years, hasn't it? And the only thing in animal language that people have learned to understand is that when a dog wags his tail he means 'I'm glad'! It's funny isn't it? You are the very first man to talk like us. Oh, sometimes people annoy me dreadfully - such airs they put on, talking about 'the dumb animals.' Dumb! Huh! Why I knew a macaw once who could say 'Good morning' in seven different ways.

Contented speckled hens, industriously scratching for the rarely-found corn, may sometimes do more for a sick heart than a grove of nightingales; there is something irresistibly calming in the unsentimental cheeriness of top-knotted pullets, unpetted sheep-dogs, and patient cart-horses enjoying a drink of muddy water.

They have forgotten, if they ever knew, the ancient knowledge that only by being truly sick can one regain health. Even beasts know when it is good and proper to throw up. Teach me how to be sick then, in the right time and place, so that I may again walk in the fields and with the wise and smiling dogs know enough to chew sweet grass. ***

Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” from Leaves of Grass. I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d, I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth. So they show their relations to me and I accept them, They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their possession.

What was it, she wondered, this need to brandish his shiny new metropolitan life at her? As soon as she'd met him at the arrivals gate on his return from Thailand, lithe and brown and shaven-headed, she knew that there was no chance of a relationship between them. Too much had happened to him, too little had happened to her. Even so this would be the third girlfriend, lover, whatever, that she had met in the last nine months, Dexter presenting them up to her like a dog with a fat pigeon in his mouth. Was it some kind of some sick revenge for something? Because she got a better degree than him? Didn't he know what this was doing to her, sat at table nine with their groins jammed in each other's faces?

With my dog-eyes I stop before the sea. Tremulous and sick. Bent, thin, I smell fish in the driftwood. Fishbone. Tail. I gaze at the sea but don’t know its name. I remain standing there, askance, and what I feel is also nameless. I feel my dog body. I don’t know the world, nor the sea in front of me. I lie down because my dog body orders it. There’s a bark in my throat, a gentle howl. I try to expel it but man-dog I know that I’m dying and I will never be heard. Now I’m a spirit. I’m free and fly over my miserable being, my abandonment, the nothing that contains me and that made me on Earth. I am rising, wet like fog.

He played Sarah McLachlan. For the rest of my life whenever I'd get a latte or see a sick dog, I'd think about my hymen.

Even pets need touching love. Dogs often quit eating, get sick and sometimes even die from a lack of love.

Think of how you feel when you are sick, or how you felt when you were learning to ride your bike. The physical state of your body has a direct effect on how you think about the world, on the state of your mind. I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that your body has a direct effect on who you are. (30) In an essay by Eric Saidel, Sirius Black: Man or Dog

He hated hospitals, hated them. The stench of Domestos and death seemed to linger in his nostrils and on his clothes for weeks, as if to remind him of something bad. It was even rare to find a tasty nurse these days. Most of the ones he'd seen this afternoon had been as ugly as sin.

a recent column for Asia Times, Spengler argued that cultures facing their own imminent demise implode or lash out. They operate under a different standard of rationality, like a man who has been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Our modern idea of rational behavior fails to comprehend that kind of spiritual crisis. He wrote: “Individuals trapped in a dying culture live in a twilight world. They embrace death through infertility, concupiscence, and war. A dog will crawl into a hole to die. The members of sick cultures do not do anything quite so dramatic, but they cease to have children, dull their senses with alcohol and drugs, become despondent, and too frequently do away with themselves. Or they may make war on the perceived source of their humiliation.”[52]

Josef Stalin once said that ‘Gratitude is a sickness suffered by dogs.’ Let us correct this: Ingratitude is a horrible disease belongs to the callous rocks! A grateful dog is a being much more developed than an ungrateful man!

There’s another familiar adage: “Every dog has his day.” Well, Joe and most dogs I’ve known have not only their day but most of mine and parts of other people’s, too. When the day isn’t theirs, you’d better get them to the vet’s. They’re sick. So,

Look,I'll pay you for a cup of coffee and the use of this-" she thumped a hand on the sofa and a soft plume of dust rose up "-thing for the night." "I don't take in lodgers." "And you'd probably kick a sick dog if he got in your way," she added evenly.

Mom? What do they do in the graveyard, Mom, under the ground? Just lay there?" "Lie there." "Lie there? Is that all they do? It doesn't sound like much fun." "For goodness' sake, it's not made out to be fun." "Why don't they jump up and run around once in a while if they get tired lying there? God's pretty silly--" "Martin!" "Well, you'd think He'd treat people better than to tell them to lie still for keeps. That's impossible. Nobody can do it! I tried once. Dog tries. I tell him, 'dead Dog!' He plays dead awhile, then gets sick and tired and wags his tail or opens one eye and looks at me, bored. Boy, I bet sometimes those graveyard people do the same, huh, Dog?" Dog barked. "Be still with that kind of talk!" said Mother. Martin looked off into space. "Bet that's exactly what they do," he said.

I was baptized one foggy afternoon about four o'clock. I couldn't think of any names I particularly wanted, so I kept my old name. I was alone with the fat priest; it was all very quickly and formally done, while someone at a children's service muttered in another chapel. Then we shook hands and I went off to a salmon tea, and the dog which had been sick again on the mat. Before that I had made a general confession to another priest: it was like a life photographed as it came to mind, without any order, full of gaps, giving at best a general impression. I couldn't help feeling all the way to the newspaper office, past the Post Office, the Moroccan café, the ancient whore, that I had got somewhere new by way of memories I hadn't known I possessed. I had taken up the thread of life from very far back, from as far back as innocence.

It was once said that the blues is nothing more than a good man feeling bad, and that’s what it is. Believe me, singing a blues song makes you feel better afterwards. Singing the blues doesn’t mean that you have them at that minute—the blues usually crawl up on you late at night or early in the morning. You get the blues when someone close to you dies or has an accident or gets sick, or when your dog passes away, and singing is a way of letting go of it.

As they started across the road, a boy biked by,shooting Grant a quick look before he ducked his chin on his chest and pedaled away. "One of your admirers?" Gennie asked dryly. "I chased him and three of his friends off the cliffs a few weeks back." "You're a real sport." Grant only grinned, remembering his first reaction had been fury at having his peace interrupted, then fear that the four careless boys would break their necks on the rocks. "Ayah," he said, recalling with pleasure the acid tongue-lashing he'd doled out. "Do you really kick sick dogs?" she asked as she caught the gleam in his eye. "Only on my own land.

His assistants left him pretty well alone, apart from attending to his dressings, for not only was he a dangerous patient, stubborn, dogged and even violent if attempted to be dosed according to any system but his own, but he was also their superior in naval and in medical rank, being a physician and the author of highly-esteemed works on seamen's diseases, an officer much caressed by the Sick and Hurt Board: furthermore he was no more consistent than other men and in spite of his liberal principles and his dislike of constituted authority he was capable of petulant tyranny when confronted with a slimedraught early in the morning.

God: The creation of a sick fantasy. Inhabitant of senile and impotent brains. Companion and comforter of rancid spirits born to slavery. A pill for constipated minds. Marxism for the faint of heart. Humanity: An abstract word with a negative connotation, long on power, short on truth. An obscene mask painted on the mean face of a shrewd vulgarian for the purpose of dominating the multitude of sentimentalist idiots and imbeciles. Country: Penal servitude for the semi-intelligent, a cowshed of imbecility. A Circe who transforms her adoring fans into dogs and pigs. A prostitute for the master, a pimp of the foreigner. Child-eater, parent-slanderer and scoffer at heroes.

The lamb baa-ed vigorously as Mary dragged it into the manicure room, and Zel winced. She really should insist Julie come work, She could use the help, plus it would mean extra mother-daughter time--and, Zel thought wryly, I won't have to find a spare tower in the suburbs. Closing the appointment book, Zel went to finish trimming Linda's hair. "Did I hear a sheep out there?" Linda asked. "Sick dog," Zel said. "Now, bend your head down." Linda obeyed and Zel ran her fingers through the back of her hair to check for evenness. All she needed to do was think of a way to make Julie come without Julie immediately assuming her mother was trying to ruin her life. Not an easy task.

As I went to stand up, I felt a tiny point of pressure on my back. "Don't move," Kasey whispered. I stayed bent over. "Drop the knife," she said. "Excuse me, I'm using it," I said. She swallowed hard. "For what?" "Mom and Dad. You." The pressure on my back increased. "Drop it, Alexis." Drop it? Like I was a bad dog running around with a sock in my mouth. "How long will this take?" I asked, setting the knife on the floor. "I'm in the middle of something." Get in the bathroom," she said. The faster I indulged her, the faster it would be over with. So I walked into the bathroom. She followed, kicking the knife toward the end of the hallway and flipping on the bathroom light. "What's this all about, Kasey?" I asked, turning around. At the sight of my face, she gasped, and the point of the fireplace poker she was holding wavered in her hands. I realized a second too late that I'd missed my chance to grab it and smash it into the side of her head. "What's happening to you?" she whispered. I glanced in the mirror. The darkness had begun to spread from my mouth and eyes. It leached out in inky puddles with thin tendrils of black snaking out in delicate feathery patterns. What's happening to me? What was she talking about? "So you have a pointy stick," I said. "Big deal. get out of my way." "What are you going to do?" I sneered. "Poke me?" 'I'll hit you, Lexi." Her face was stony. "As hard as I have to." Whatever. I'm really not in the mood. "Can we talk about this in the morning?" I asked. After I kill you? "No," her eyes hardened. "Get your toothbrush." "What?" "Pick up your toothbrush, and stick it down your throat." "Kasey-" "Do it," she said. "Ugh, fine. You're sick, you know that?" "Get in the tub." "Happy?" I stuck the toothbrush into my throat. Instantly, I gagged and doubled over. "Do it again," she said. "God Kasey," I cried. Stabbing people was one thing. But making them barf- that was just disturbing.

I couldn’t even eat a hot dog without getting sick.

Oh, is that my report, father?' said Mike, with a sort of sickly interest, much as a dog about to be washed might evince in his tub.' - Mike and Psmith

I take Democrats to bed with me for lack of a dachshund, although as a matter of fact on occasions like this I am almost certain to be visited by the ghost of Fred, my dash-hound everlasting, dead these many years. In life, Fred always attended the sick, climbing right into bed with the patient like some lecherous old physician, and making a bad situation worse.

My dogs might believe, in their little doggy brains, that they wield the power in our relationship because I feed them, pet them, come when they bark, pick up their poop, buy them toys and care for them when they are sick. However, if they ever decided to act on their beliefs and try to exert power over me or my family, then their true place in the relationship would quickly become apparent. Likewise, we may feel confident that we are the master of our AI creations, only to be taken completely by surprise when we realise – too late – that we are no longer in control.

Many people who live with animals have noticed that their cat or dog becomes solicitous of them when they are feeling unwell. A cat who is normally aloof may come sit in the sick person's lap; a normally rambunctious dog may tone himself down when his human friend isn't up to romping or running. In some cases, the ability of animals to sense illness in a human has been lifesaving.

They make one journey after another and change spectacle for spectacle. As Lucretius says, 'Thus each man ever flees himself.' But to what end, if he does not escape himself? He pursues and dogs himself as his own most tedious companion. And so we must realize that our difficulty is not the fault of the places but of ourselves. We are weak in enduring anything, and cannot put up with toil or pleasure or ourselves or anything for long. This weakness has driven some men to their deaths; because by frequently changing their aims they kept falling back on the same things and had left themselves no room for novelty. They began to be sick of life and the world itself, and out of their enervating self-indulgence arose the feeling 'How long must I face the same things?

As for business, we agree that it is a hard, cold-blooded game. Survival of the fittest. Dog eat dog. The fact that about eighty-five per cent of the dogs have recently been eaten by the other dogs perhaps explains what long ago we noticed about business: that it had a strong smell of boloney. If dog continues to eat dog, there will be only one dog left, and he will be sick to his stomach.

Once unpacked, I saw my family downstairs. Each step released something spidery inside me: the sick-making terror of need. Needing the accumulative, impervious love of being forced to eat all your broccoli even when it is making you retch and gag to put it in your mouth. The love of the TV being turned off past eleven. The love of being asked to say hello to the dog over the telephone. I’d always seen my mum and aunt from knee height, never quite managed to meet them as equals. It occurred to me how ludicrous it was that families slept in separate bedrooms, not piled on top of one another like lazily sunbathing lions.

by the assault. Shading his eyes against the dazzle from the window, he peered down into the shadows. “Oh, hallo there, wee dog,” he said politely, and took a step forward, knuckles stretched out. Bouton raised the growl a few decibels, and he took a step back. “Oh, like that, is it?” Jamie said. He eyed the dog narrowly. “Think it over, laddie,” he advised, squinting down his long, straight nose. “I’m a damn sight bigger than you. I wouldna undertake any rash ventures, if I were you.” Bouton shifted his ground slightly, still making a noise like a distant Fokker. “Faster, too,” said Jamie, making a feint to one side. Bouton’s teeth snapped together a few inches from Jamie’s calf, and he stepped back hastily. Leaning back against the wall, he folded his arms and nodded down at the dog. “Well, you’ve a point there, I’ll admit. When it comes to teeth, ye’ve the edge on me, and no mistake.” Bouton cocked an ear suspiciously at this gracious speech, but went back to the low-pitched growl. Jamie hooked one foot over the other, like one prepared to pass the time of day indefinitely. The multicolored light from the window washed his face with blue, making him look like one of the chilly marble statues in the cathedral next door. “Surely you’ve better things to do than harry innocent visitors?” he asked, conversationally. “I’ve heard of you—you’re the famous fellow that sniffs out sickness, no? Weel, then, why are they wastin’ ye on silly things like door-guarding, when ye might be makin’ yourself useful smelling gouty toes and pustulant arseholes?

The one absolutely unselfish friend that man can have in this selfish world, the one that never deserts him, the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous, is his dog. A man’s dog stands by him in prosperity and in poverty, in health and in sickness. He will sleep on the cold ground, where the wintry winds blow and the snow drives fiercely, if only he may be near his master’s side. He will kiss the hand that has no food to offer; he will lick the wounds and sores that come in encounter with the roughness of the world. He guards the sleep of his pauper master as if he were a prince. When all other friends desert, he remains. When riches take wing and reputation falls to pieces, he is as constant in his love as the sun in its journey through the heavens. —SENATOR GEORGE VEST, 1870 Each

The dark has a eased a little. There has been a street-lamp burning, that has lit the threads of the bleached net scarf hung at the window, now it is put out. The light turns filthy pink. The pink gives way to sickly yellow. It creeps, and with it creeps sound - softly at first, then rising in a staggering crescendo: crowning cocks, whistles and bells, dogs, shrieking babies, violent calling, coughing, spitting, the tramp of feet, the endless hollow of beating hooves and the grinding of wheels. Up, up it comes, out of the throat of London. It is six or seven o'clock.

Identity, though, is a difficult matter to tease out, especially in a time of flux. How to tell a spaniel from a retriever when all dogs have become middle-sized and brown? Should we go by some arbitrary blood quantum wherein half makes an Indian and forty-nine percent makes something else? Certainly forty-nine percent does not a whiteman make, at least not by the laws then prevailing in our state and most others. Or do we go by the old ways, the clans and the mothers, blood degree be damned? Or by what language someone dreams in or prays in or curses in? Or whether they cook bean bread and still tell the tales of Spearfinger and Uktena by the winter fire and go to water when they’re sick? And what if they did all those things but were blond and square-headed as Norsemen? Or do we just hold a dry oak leaf to their cheeks and cull by whether they are darker or lighter?

A thinker erects an immense building, a system, a system which embraces the whole of existence and world-history, etc. And if we contemplate his personal life, we discover to our astonishment this terrible and ludicrous fact, that he himself personally does not live in this immense high-vaulted palace, but in a barn alongside of it, or in a dog kennel, or at the most in the porter’s lodge. If one were to take the liberty of calling his attention to this by a single word, he would be offended. For he has no fear of being under a delusion, if only he can get the system completed… by means of the delusion.

I thought about how houses weren't just houses. They were like relationships. They're where we unfold ourselves -- the real version of us -- the first-thing-in-the-morning, up-late-working, sick-as-a-dog, movie-watching, crying-in-a-heap version of ourselves. Slowly but surely, our places become a part of us.

He who has known the other days, the angry ones of gout attacks, or those with that wicked headache rooted behind the eyeballs that casts a spell on every nerve of eye and ear with a fiendish delight in torture, or soul-destroying, evil days of inward vacancy and despair, when, onthis distracted earth, sucked dry by the vampires of finance, the world of men and of so-called culture grins back at us with the lying, vulgar, brazen glamor of a Fair and dogs us with the persistence of an emetic, and when all is concentrated and focused to the last pitch of the intolerable upon your own sick self—he who has known these days of hell may be contente indeed with normal half-and-half days like today. Thankfully you sit by the warm stove, thankfully you assure yourself as you read your morning paper that another day has come and no war broken out, no new dictatorship has been set up, no particularly disgusting scandal been unveiled in the worlds of politics or finance. Thankfully you tune the strings of your moldering lyre to a moderated, to a passably joyful, nay, to an even delighted psalm of thanksgiving and with it bore your quiet, flabby and slightly stupefied half-and-half god of contentment; and in the thick warm air of a contented boredom and very welcome painlessness the nodding mandarin of a half-and-half god and the nodding middle-aged gentleman who sings his muffled psalm look as like each other as two peas.

Bill.' If you don't, I'll do this," and with that he gave me a twitch that I thought would have made me faint. Between this and that, I was so utterly terrified of the blind beggar that I forgot my terror of the captain, and as I opened the parlour door, cried out the words he had ordered in a trembling voice. The poor captain raised his eyes, and at one look the rum went out of him and left him staring sober. The expression of his face was not so much of terror as of mortal sickness. He made a movement to rise, but I do not believe he had enough force left in his body. "Now, Bill, sit where you are," said the beggar. "If I can't see, I can hear a finger stirring. Business is business. Hold out your left hand. Boy, take his left hand by the wrist and bring it near to my right." We both obeyed him to the letter, and I saw him pass something from the hollow of the hand that held his stick into the palm of the captain's, which closed upon it instantly. "And now that's done," said the blind man; and at the words he suddenly left hold of me, and with incredible accuracy and nimbleness, skipped out of the parlour and into the road, where, as I still stood motionless, I could hear his stick go tap-tap-tapping into the distance. It was some time before either I or the captain seemed to gather our senses, but at length, and about at the same moment, I released his wrist, which I was still holding, and he drew in his hand and looked sharply into the palm. "Ten o'clock!" he cried. "Six hours. We'll do them yet," and he sprang to his feet. Even as he did so, he reeled, put his hand to his throat, stood swaying for a moment, and then, with a peculiar sound, fell from his whole height face foremost to the floor. I ran to him at once, calling to my mother. But haste was all in vain. The captain had been struck dead by thundering apoplexy. It is a curious thing to understand, for I had certainly never liked the man, though of late I had begun to pity him, but as soon as I saw that he was dead, I burst into a flood of tears. It was the second death I had known, and the sorrow of the first was still fresh in my heart. 4 The Sea-chest I LOST no time, of course, in telling my mother all that I knew, and perhaps should have told her long before, and we saw ourselves at once in a difficult and dangerous position. Some of the man's money—if he had any—was certainly due to us, but it was not likely that our captain's shipmates, above all the two specimens seen by me, Black Dog and the blind beggar, would be inclined to give up their booty in payment of the dead man's debts. The captain's order to mount at once and ride for Doctor Livesey would have left my mother alone and unprotected, which was not to be thought of. Indeed, it seemed impossible for either of us to remain much longer in the house; the fall of coals in the kitchen grate, the very ticking of the clock, filled us with alarms. The neighbourhood, to our ears, seemed haunted by approaching footsteps; and what between the dead body of the captain on the parlour floor and the thought of that detestable blind beggar hovering near at hand and ready to return, there were moments when, as the saying goes, I jumped in my skin for terror. Something must speedily be resolved upon, and it occurred to us at last to go forth together and seek help in the neighbouring hamlet. No sooner said than done. Bare-headed as we were, we ran out at once in the gathering evening and the frosty fog. The hamlet lay not many hundred yards away, though out of view, on the other side of the next cove; and what greatly encouraged me, it was in an opposite direction from that whence the blind man had made his appearance and whither he had presumably returned. We were not many minutes on the road, though we sometimes stopped to lay hold of each other and hearken. But there was no unusual sound—nothing but the low wash of the ripple and the croaking of the inmates of the wood.

It was less symmetrical, in the sheen of the rain, than he remembered it. Then he saw that a man rested there on its steps, his head turned on the rim. One coatless arm, lying loose, pillowed it. The arcade lanterns, dimly exploring, found the darkened blond of soaked hair; the fixed flame of strung jewels and the line of wide brow and closed lid and turned cheekbone whose twin he saw, night after night, on his pillow. The rain fell. For a moment Jerott stood petrified. Then he ran for his life over the courtyard. Francis Crawford opened his eyes. ‘It’s all right,’ he said without moving. ‘The crucifix marque-vin. I’ve been as sick as a dog. I deserve to be, don’t you think? Poor, bloody Jerott, caught between bastards.

I just care about you so much … but I’ve always got this fear that … one day you’ll leave. Or Pip and Jason will leave, or … I don’t know.’ Fresh tears fell from my cheeks. ‘I’m never going to fall in love, so … my friendships are all I have, so … I just … can’t bear the idea of losing any of my friends. Because I’m never going to have that one special person.’ ‘Can you let me be that person?’ Rooney said quietly. I sniffed loudly. ‘What d’you mean?’ ‘I mean I want to be your special person.’ [...] ‘But you know what I realised on my walk?’ she said. ‘I realise that I love you, Georgia.’ My mouth dropped open. ‘Obviously I’m not romantically in love with you. But I realised that whatever these feelings are for you, I …’ She grinned wildly. ‘I feel like I am in love. Me and you – this is a fucking love story! I feel like I’ve found something most people just don’t get. I feel at home around you in a way I have never felt in my fucking life. And maybe most people would look at us and think that we’re just friends, or whatever, but I know that it’s just … so much MORE than that.’ She gestured dramatically at me with both hands. ‘You changed me. You … you fucking saved me, I swear to God. I know I still do a lot of dumb stuff and I say the wrong things and I still have days where I just feel like shit but … I’ve felt happier over the past few weeks than I have in years.’ I couldn’t speak. I was frozen. Rooney dropped to her knees. ‘Georgia, I am never going to stop being your friend. And I don’t mean that in the boring average meaning of ‘friend’ where we stop talking regularly when we’re twenty-five because we’ve both met nice young men and gone off to have babies, and only get to meet up twice a year. I mean I’m going to pester you to buy a house next door to me when we’re forty-five and have finally saved up enough for our deposits. I mean I’m going to be crashing round yours every night for dinner because you know I can’t fucking cook to save my life, and if I’ve got kids and a spouse, they’ll probably come round with me, because otherwise they’ll be living on chicken nuggets and chips. I mean I’m going to be the one bringing you soup when you text me that you’re sick and can’t get out of bed and ferrying you to the doctor’s even when you don’t want to go because you feel guilty about using the NHS when you just have a stomach bug. I mean we’re gonna knock down the fence between our gardens so we have one big garden, and we can both get a dog and take turns looking after it. I mean I’m going to be here, annoying you, until we’re old ladies, sitting in the same care home, talking about putting on a Shakespeare because we’re all old and bored as shit.’ She grabbed the bunch of flowers and practically threw them at me. ‘And I bought these for you because I honestly didn’t know how else to express any of that to you.’ I was crying. I just started crying again. Rooney wiped the tears off my cheeks.

TRIBUTE TO A DOG The one absolutely unselfish friend that man can have in this selfish world, the one that never deserts him, the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous, is his dog. A man’s dog stands by him in prosperity and in poverty, in health and in sickness. He will sleep on the cold ground, where the wintry winds blow and the snow drives fiercely, if only he may be near his master’s side. He will kiss the hand that has no food to offer; he will lick the wounds and sores that come in encounter with the roughness of the world. He guards the sleep of his pauper master as if he were a prince. When all other friends desert, he remains. When riches take wing and reputation falls to pieces, he is as constant in his love as the sun in its journey through the heavens. —SENATOR GEORGE VEST, 1870

Barry, if I were to say to you that I haven’t seen Reservoir Dogs yet, what would that mean?” Barry looks at me. “Just…come on, what would it mean to you? That sentence? ‘I haven’t seen Reservoir Dogs yet?’” “To me, it would mean that you’re a liar. Either that or you’ve gone potty. You saw it twice. Once with Laura, once with me and Dick. We had that conversation about who killed Mr. Pink or whatever fucking color he was.” “Yeah, yeah, I know. But say I hadn’t seen it and I said to you, ‘I haven’t seen Reservoir Dogs yet,’ what would you think?” “I’d think, you’re a sick man. And I’d feel sorry for you.” “No, but would you think, from that one sentence, that I was going to see it?” “I’d hope you were, yeah, otherwise I would have to say that you’re not a friend of mine.” “No, but—” “I’m sorry, Rob, but I’m struggling here. I don’t understand any part of this conversation. You’re asking me what I’d think if you told me that you hadn’t seen a film that you’ve seen. What am I supposed to say?” “Just listen to me. If I said to you—” —“‘I haven’t seen Reservoir Dogs yet,’ yeah, yeah, I hear you—” “Would you …would you get the impression that I wanted to see it?” “Well…you couldn’t have been desperate, otherwise you’d have already gone.” “Exactly. We went first night, didn’t we?” “But the word yet… yeah, I’d get the impression that you wanted to see it. Otherwise you’d say you didn’t fancy it much.” “But in your opinion, would I definitely go?” “How am I supposed to know that? You might get run over by a bus, or go blind, or anything. You might go off the idea. You might be broke. You might just get sick of people telling you you’ve really got to go.” I don’t like the sound of that. “Why would they care?” “Because it’s a brilliant film. It’s funny, and violent, and it’s got Harvey Keitel and Tim Roth in it, and everything. And a cracking sound track.

By early 1979, the border area is a dead-eyed, stinking hell. He signs on as an aid worker with the Red Cross and they give him a stipend and a room. In January, the Vietnamese Communists crossed the Cambodian border, swept the Khmer Rouge aside, and took Phnom Penh in less than two weeks. The refugees wash up in their black clothes, so debilitated and disturbed that Hiroji thinks he is walking through an exhumed cemetery, they are more soil and sickness than human beings.

{On the death of Hale's esteemed friend and fellow scientist, Luther Burbank. Burbank was much beloved by the population unil in an interview he revealed that he was an atheist. After this, the public turned on him and sent him thousands of letters with death threats. This upset the kind-hearted Burbank, who tried to amiably reply to each letter, so much that it ultimately led to his death} . . . he was misled into believing that logic, kindliness, and reason could convince and help the bigoted. He fell sick. The sickness was fated to be his last. What killed Luther Burbank, at just that time and in just that abrupt and tragic fashion, was his baffled, yearning, desperate effort to make people understand. His desire to help them, to clarify their minds, and to induce them to substitute fact for hysteria drove him beyond his strength. He grew suddenly old attempting to make reasonable a people which had been unreasonable through twenty stiff-necked generations. . . He died, not a martyr to truth, but a victim of the fatuity of blasting dogged falsehood.

I knew that I was in better shape than she was because I was the one who pushed for the split. Still, even a year later I was still very vulnerable to her actions. If I saw her at the supermarket, or someone brought her name up, or if she called about something, which she seemed to do pretty often—like she was trying to find stuff to talk to me about, did I see the exhibit, so-and-so called, the dog got sick, you know—I was always upset by it, by talking to her, being reminded of her. I just wanted it to be over and it just took a long time for that to happen, for that connection to be broken. [DENTAL ASSISTANT, AGE 27, SEPARATED AFTER LIVING TOGETHER 3 YEARS]

I wiped the blade against my jeans and walked into the bar. It was mid-afternoon, very hot and still. The bar was deserted. I ordered a whisky. The barman looked at the blood and asked: ‘God?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘S’pose it’s time someone finished that hypocritical little punk, always bragging about his old man’s power…’ He smiled crookedly, insinuatingly, a slight nausea shuddered through me. I replied weakly: ‘It was kind of sick, he didn’t fight back or anything, just kept trying to touch me and shit, like one of those dogs that try to fuck your leg. Something in me snapped, the whingeing had ground me down too low. I really hated that sanctimonious little creep.’ ‘So you snuffed him?’ ‘Yeah, I’ve killed him, knifed the life out of him, once I started I got frenzied, it was an ecstasy, I never knew I could hate so much.’ I felt very calm, slightly light-headed. The whisky tasted good, vaporizing in my throat. We were silent for a few moments. The barman looked at me levelly, the edge of his eyes twitching slightly with anxiety: There’ll be trouble though, don’tcha think?’ ‘I don’t give a shit, the threats are all used up, I just don’t give a shit.’ ‘You know what they say about his old man? Ruthless bastard they say. Cruel…’ ‘I just hope I’ve hurt him, if he even exists.’ ‘Woulden wanna cross him merself,’ he muttered. I wanted to say ‘yeah, well that’s where we differ’, but the energy for it wasn’t there. The fan rotated languidly, casting spidery shadows across the room. We sat in silence a little longer. The barman broke first: ‘So God’s dead?’ ‘If that’s who he was. That fucking kid lied all the time. I just hope it’s true this time.’ The barman worked at one of his teeth with his tongue, uneasily: ‘It’s kindova big crime though, isn’t it? You know how it is, when one of the cops goes down and everything’s dropped ’til they find the guy who did it. I mean, you’re not just breaking a law, your breaking LAW.’ I scraped my finger along my jeans, and suspended it over the bar, so that a thick clot of blood fell down into my whisky, and dissolved. I smiled: ‘Maybe it’s a big crime,’ I mused vaguely ‘but maybe it’s nothing at all…’ ‘…and we have killed him’ writes Nietzsche, but—destituted of community—I crave a little time with him on my own. In perfect communion I lick the dagger foamed with God’s blood.

It is now time to face the fact that English is a crazy language — the most loopy and wiggy of all tongues. In what other language do people drive in a parkway and park in a driveway? In what other language do people play at a recital and recite at a play? Why does night fall but never break and day break but never fall? Why is it that when we transport something by car, it’s called a shipment, but when we transport something by ship, it’s called cargo? Why does a man get a hernia and a woman a hysterectomy? Why do we pack suits in a garment bag and garments in a suitcase? Why do privates eat in the general mess and generals eat in the private mess? Why do we call it newsprint when it contains no printing but when we put print on it, we call it a newspaper? Why are people who ride motorcycles called bikers and people who ride bikes called cyclists? Why — in our crazy language — can your nose run and your feet smell?Language is like the air we breathe. It’s invisible, inescapable, indispensable, and we take it for granted. But, when we take the time to step back and listen to the sounds that escape from the holes in people’s faces and to explore the paradoxes and vagaries of English, we find that hot dogs can be cold, darkrooms can be lit, homework can be done in school, nightmares can take place in broad daylight while morning sickness and daydreaming can take place at night, tomboys are girls and midwives can be men, hours — especially happy hours and rush hours — often last longer than sixty minutes, quicksand works very slowly, boxing rings are square, silverware and glasses can be made of plastic and tablecloths of paper, most telephones are dialed by being punched (or pushed?), and most bathrooms don’t have any baths in them. In fact, a dog can go to the bathroom under a tree —no bath, no room; it’s still going to the bathroom. And doesn’t it seem a little bizarre that we go to the bathroom in order to go to the bathroom? Why is it that a woman can man a station but a man can’t woman one, that a man can father a movement but a woman can’t mother one, and that a king rules a kingdom but a queen doesn’t rule a queendom? How did all those Renaissance men reproduce when there don’t seem to have been any Renaissance women? Sometimes you have to believe that all English speakers should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane: In what other language do they call the third hand on the clock the second hand? Why do they call them apartments when they’re all together? Why do we call them buildings, when they’re already built? Why it is called a TV set when you get only one? Why is phonetic not spelled phonetically? Why is it so hard to remember how to spell mnemonic? Why doesn’t onomatopoeia sound like what it is? Why is the word abbreviation so long? Why is diminutive so undiminutive? Why does the word monosyllabic consist of five syllables? Why is there no synonym for synonym or thesaurus? And why, pray tell, does lisp have an s in it? If adults commit adultery, do infants commit infantry? If olive oil is made from olives, what do they make baby oil from? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian consume? If pro and con are opposites, is congress the opposite of progress? ...

The few remaining men can exist out their puny days dropped out on drugs or strutting around in drag or passively watching the high-powered female in action, fulfilling themselves as spectators, vicarious liver*, or breeding in the cow pasture with the toadies, or they can go off to the nearest friendly suicide center where they will be quietly, quickly, and painlessly gassed to death. Prior to the institution of automation, to the replacement of males by machines, the male should be of use to the female, wait on her, cater to her slightest whim, obey her every command, be totally subservient to her, exist in perfect obedience to her will, as opposed to the completely warped, degenerate situation we have now of men, not only not only not existing at all, cluttering up the world with their ignominious presence, but being pandered to and groveled before by the mass of females, millions of women piously worshiping the Golden Calf, the dog leading the master on a leash, when in fact the male, short of being a drag queen, is least miserable when his dogginess is recognized – no unrealistic emotional demands are made of him and the completely together female is calling the shots. Rational men want to be squashed, stepped on, crushed and crunched, treated as the curs, the filth that they are, have their repulsiveness confirmed. The sick, irrational men, those who attempt to defend themselves against their disgustingness, when they see SCUM barreling down on them, will cling in terror to Big Mama with her Big Bouncy Boobies, but Boobies won’t protect them against SCUM; Big Mama will be clinging to Big Daddy, who will be in the corner shitting in his forceful, dynamic pants. Men who are rational, however, won’t kick or struggle or raise a distressing fuss, but will just sit back, relax, enjoy the show and ride the waves to their demise.

the following prayer by Dr. Jane Goodall, who was named a UN Messenger of Peace for her continued world efforts, she seems to touch on most aspects of world conflict as we know them today and as they pertain to all living things. Prayer for World Peace We pray to the great Spiritual Power in which we live and move and have our being. We pray that we may at all times keep our minds open to new ideas and shun dogma; that we may grow in our understanding of the nature of all living beings and our connectedness with the natural world; that we may become ever more filled with generosity of spirit and true compassion and love for all life; that we may strive to heal the hurts that we have inflicted on nature and control our greed for material things, knowing that our actions are harming our natural world and the future of our children; that we may value each and every human being for who he is, for who she is, reaching to the spirit that is within,knowing the power of each individual to change the world. We pray for social justice, for the alleviation of the crippling poverty that condemns millions of people around the world to lives of misery—hungry, sick, and utterly without hope. We pray for the children who are starving,who are condemned to homelessness, slave labor, and prostitution, and especially for those forced to fight, to kill and torture even members of their own family. We pray for the victims of violence and war, for those wounded in body and for those wounded in mind. We pray for the multitudes of refugees, forced from their homes to alien places through war or through the utter destruction of their environment. We pray for suffering animals everywhere, for an end to the pain caused by scientific experimentation, intensive farming, fur farming, shooting, trapping, training for entertainment, abusive pet owners, and all other forms of exploitation such as overloading and overworking pack animals, bull fighting, badger baiting, dog and cock fighting and so many more. We pray for an end to cruelty, whether to humans or other animals, for an end to bullying, and torture in all its forms. We pray that we may learn the peace that comes with forgiving and the strength we gain in loving; that we may learn to take nothing for granted in this life; that we may learn to see and understand with our hearts; that we may learn to rejoice in our being. We pray for these things with humility; We pray because of the hope that is within us, and because of a faith in the ultimate triumph of the human spirit; We pray because of our love for Creation, and because of our trust in God. We pray, above all, for peace throughout the world. I love this beautiful and magnanimous prayer. Each request is spelled out clearly and specifically, and it asks that love, peace, and kindness be shown to all of earth’s creatures, not just its human occupants.

Before I knew it, the first animal had entered the chute. Various cowboys were at different positions around the animal and began carrying out their respective duties. Tim looked at me and yelled, “Stick it in!” With utter trepidation, I slid the wand deep into the steer’s rectum. This wasn’t natural. This wasn’t normal. At least it wasn’t for me. This was definitely against God’s plan. I was supposed to check the monitor and announce if the temperature was above ninety-degrees. The first one was fine. But before I had a chance to remove the probe, Tim set the hot branding iron against the steer’s left hip. The animal let out a guttural Mooooooooooooo!, and as he did, the contents of its large intestine emptied all over my hand and forearm. Tim said, “Okay, Ree, you can take it out now.” I did. I didn’t know what to do. My arm was covered in runny, stinky cow crap. Was this supposed to happen? Should I say anything? I glanced at my sister, who was looking at me, completely horrified. The second animal entered the chute. The routine began again. I stuck it in. Tim branded. The steer bellowed. The crap squirted out. I was amazed at how consistent and predictable the whole nasty process was, and how nonchalant everyone--excluding my sister--was acting. But then slowly…surely…I began to notice something. On about the twentieth animal, I began inserting the thermometer. Tim removed his branding iron from the fire and brought it toward the steer’s hip. At the last second, however, I fumbled with my device and had to stop for a moment. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that when I paused, Tim did, too. It appeared he was actually waiting until I had the thermometer fully inserted before he branded the animal, ensuring that I’d be right in the line of fire when everything came pouring out. He had planned this all along, the dirty dog. Seventy-eight steers later, we were finished. I was a sight. Layer upon layer of manure covered my arm. I’m sure I was pale and in shock. The cowboys grinned politely. Tim directed me to an outdoor faucet where I could clean my arm. Marlboro Man watched as he gathered up the tools and the gear…and he chuckled. As my sister and I pulled away in the car later that day, she could only say, “Oh. My. God.” She made me promise never to return to that awful place. I didn’t know it at the time, but I’d found out later that this, from Tim’s perspective, was my initiation. It was his sick, twisted way of measuring my worth.