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

“A high degree of intelligence yes in no other creature in the natural world. That's why nature shuns us and why we subconsciously hate her and seek to obliterate her. High intelligence leads to the concept of progress. Progress leads to nuclear weapons, bio-engineering chaos and ultimately to annihilation.”

“Malevolence and paranoia cohabit in a twisted mind. Bad men trust no one because they know the treachery of which they themselves are capable.Bad men...destroy one another, although...they prefer those who are innocent and as pure as this world allows them to be. They feed on violence, but they feast on the despoiling of what is good.”

“One reason Elvis mattered, she said, was that in his prime, pop music had still been politically innocent, therefore deeply life-affirming, therefore relevant. By the time he died, most pop songs had become, usually without the conscious intention of those who wrote and sang them, anthems endorsing the values of fascism, which remains the case to this day.”

“No matter how close we are to another person, few human relationships are as free from strife, disagreement, and frustration as is the relationship you have with a good dog. Few human beings give of themselves to another as a dog gives of itself. I also suspect that we cherish dogs because their unblemished souls make us wish - consciously or unconsciously - that we were as innocent as they are, and make us yearn for a place where innocence is universal and where the meanness, the betrayals, and the cruelties of this world are unknown.”

“Some lives, conducted with grace, are beautiful arcs bridging this world to eternity.”

“The opportunity to love a dog and to treat it with kindness is an opportunity for a lost and selfish heart to be redeemed. They are powerless and innocent, and it is how we treat the humblest among us that surely determines the fate of our souls”