Donald McCaig > Quotes

“More often than we care to admit, inconsequential decisions change our lives.”
― Donald McCaig, Rhett Butler's People

“I'm afraid, Belle, that being a lady is more than proper clothes. It is an attitude. From your...experience, you may know more of business and politics than ladies are supposed to know. Gentlemen are pleased to think ladies are ornamental, and it is an ill-advised ornament who contradicts her gentleman.”
― Donald McCaig, Rhett Butler's People

“You'll want to read books - novels, because ladies are frivolous; poetry because ladies are sentimental; and sermons, because we are pious. If you must read essays, Mr. Emerson might be best. Your gentleman may have a nodding acquaintance with his works.”
― Donald McCaig

“You see, sister, little Miss Scarlett has no idea who she is. Her chraming tricks attract men who are unworthy of her. "Rhett's voice dropped to a whisper. "Hindoos believe we have had lives before this. Is it true? He raised a mocking eyebrow. Perhaps Scarlett and I were star-crossed lovers; perhaps we died in each other's arms...”
― Donald McCaig, Rhett Butler's People

“Rosemary, in his heart your brother is a lover. The shrewd businessman, the adventurer, the dandy are but costumes the lover wears. ”
― Donald McCaig, Rhett Butler's People

“He said, 'Life has hurt us again.'
A worse hurt than those hurts we have already endured?'
No,' he said, 'I suppose not.”
― Donald McCaig, Rhett Butler's People

“He'd sit and listen to Nana's Jesus stories all day, but when she turned to the Old Testament prophets, Louis Valentine's little face would darken. He said, "I hate it when God is mean!”
― Donald McCaig, Rhett Butler's People

“Do you believe your gentle birth will turn a bullet?"
"Why, yes," Rhett said solemnly. "Hell yes! Gentle birth's got to be good for something!”
― Donald McCaig, Rhett Butler's People

“Patriotic'? Dear, dear me!" Scarlett covered her mouth in mock astonishment. "I didn't know that was 'patriotism.' I believe what you intended has ruder names, though no well-bred Georgia lady would admit to knowing them.”
― Donald McCaig, Rhett Butler's People

“Frederick Ward thought novels immoral and had been known to leave the room rather than subject himself to "bohemian" opinions.”
― Donald McCaig, Rhett Butler's People

“Gardeners impose human values on disorderly nature, knowing full well that nature must win in the end. Gardening is gentle gallantry. - Rosemary Butler”
― Donald McCaig, Rhett Butler's People

“I never saw a sky so blue. Rhett, it's worth living a man's whole life, if, just once, just one time, he gets to see a sky that blue.”
― Donald McCaig, Rhett Butler's People

“Sometimes those who are easiest to love are hardest to respect. - Ashley Wilkes”
― Donald McCaig, Rhett Butler's People

“I have a writer’s concentration: intense, but flickering.”
― Donald McCaig, Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men: Searching Through Scotland For A Border Collie

“Who you pretends you is, you comes to be. The nigger that bows to the Master on the street, who acts the fool, who forgets who he am, that man a slave. He shuts his bible, he deserves to be a slave”
― Donald McCaig, Ruth's Journey: The Authorized Novel of Mammy from Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind

“Dogs are notorious for hope. Dogs believe that this morning, this very morning, may begin a day of fascination, easily grander than any day in the past. Perhaps the work did go badly yesterday, perhaps the humans are wild with sulks and rages, but this morning can yet be saved: don't humans understand anything?

Every morning, in dog pounds all over America, hundreds of dogs awake to their last day with gladness in their hearts.”
― Donald McCaig, Nop's Hope

“The trainer Tony Illey has said, “The most difficult thing I ever saw a dog do was bring a ewe who’d just lost her lamb through a field full of lambing ewes.”
Let me offer a gloss: Ewes with new lambs are extremely protective of their lambs and often charge a dog. When they lose sight of their lamb, they assume the dog has killed it, and despite his teeth will try determinedly to trample him. A ewe who’s lost her lamb will rush back and forth seeking it, bleating to other newborn lambs trying to collect one. The other mothers are confused by this, and when the dog gets near them they, too, go on the attack.
Unlike Tony Illey, I don’t think what this dog did was difficult. It was impossible. Knowing that the dog can read sheep better than any man and can react much quicker than any man, what commands would you give him?
Correct answer: his name.”
― Donald McCaig, Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men: Searching Through Scotland For A Border Collie

“Lurid tales are the South’s principal export. - Rhett Butler”
― Donald McCaig, Rhett Butler's People

“By human standards, I know far more than the dogs do. But Luke and June can do what I cannot. In a millisecond, forty feet from just encountered range Rambouillets the dogs see, big as a Wall Drug bill board, which sheep is the leader. They immediately understand the complex social order in this particular miniflock. they know whether the sheep are ready to fight, split up, or break for the tall timber, because the sheep tell them what they mean to do. For the sake of that instant, for that millisecond, that's why the Mister and Missus have put so many miles beneath their paws. Luke and June have developed an all-sheep, all-breed, all-terrain method that doesn't give them an edge over dogs who've been working these sheep on this terrain all their lives, but does help them transmute the novel into the manageable”
― Donald McCaig, Mr. and Mrs. Dog: Our Travels, Trials, Adventures, and Epiphanies

“Who you pretends you is, you comes to be. The bigger what bows to the Master on the street, who acts the fool, who forgets who he am, that man a slave. He shuts his bible, he deserves to be a slave”
― Donald McCaig, Ruth's Journey: The Authorized Novel of Mammy from Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind

“So they can talk dogs when ladies are present southern bird dog men call their females gyps. Since modern, vulgar misuses of bitch demean all femininity, gyp is more courteous.”
― Donald McCaig, Mr. and Mrs. Dog: Our Travels, Trials, Adventures, and Epiphanies

“It is not the job of the dog trainer to summon the dog’s generics, not to impose man’s will over dog’s. It may be worth noting that many Scottish hill dogs never know the weight”
― Donald McCaig, Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men: Searching Through Scotland For A Border Collie

“Men trial sheepdogs for the usual metaphysical reasons. Some men seek justice in their own lifetime. Others, a type of immortality. Bill Crowe of Virginia once explained that he trialed, "For the pure intellectual achievement of it." Some men hope that love is proof against adversity. Some trial sheepdogs to forget - bad marriages can make good sheepdog handlers - and others trial to remember: that single moment, the flash of light on a dog's coat, the dog dead now twenty years. A few men trail because that's the only way they can reduce the world to their size; others trial for the raw information trialing provides, a flux they can puzzle over for a lifetime.”
― Donald McCaig, Nop's Hope

“Somewhere the help don’t quit as soon as the boss walks out the door. I’m gonna need a dozen clean pens.”
The lambing barn had four rows of pens against the long walls and back-to-back in the middle. At any one time the pens could hold eighty ewes and their lambs. When things went well, a ewe came into the barn on Monday and left on Thursday, and after her apartment was renovated the shepherd could install a newcomer. When a ewe had trouble – mastitis, milk fever, pneumonia, blue bag – the pens filled with sick sheep and the sheep housing stock shrank. Penny spent a couple hours examining the ewes in the barn, medicating those that needed it, turning others with their lambs out into the sunshine. She slipped bands on lambs’ tails, checked new mothers for milk supply, milked out ewes for their colostrum, ear notched bad mothers so they could be culled.”
― Donald McCaig, Nop's Hope

“The sheepdog trial is a contest of farm and ranch dogs doing the same work they do every day at home. It's a simple test: dog runs out, gathers sheep, and fetches them to his shepherd. Dog drives the sheep through obstacles. Then dog and man sort the sheep and pen them. Any halfway decent sheepdog can do it but some are better than others”
― Donald McCaig, Mr. and Mrs. Dog: Our Travels, Trials, Adventures, and Epiphanies

“Bob Brennan went on to become a fair dog handler, and he and Shep won several open trials, but he never forgot the slight woman working his dog, better than he could, out in the middle of nowhere; woman, dog, sheep moving with great precision, and she never repeated a request (Bob Brennan couldn't call them commands), and she spoke so soft - just Penny and Shep and the sky, stretching from Canada to Mexico, lighter blue at the rim than in the bowl overhead. Shep never forgot it either.”
― Donald McCaig, Nop's Hope

“The sheepdog is shown its possibilities, he learns what life is like for a good dog and is invited to walk in a rational world whose further boundaries are defined by grace.”
― Donald McCaig, Nop's Hope

“Every trainer I spoke to, though advocating methods as contradictory as Koehler and pharmacological behaviorism, agreed on four basic principles. The are magic principles, and so important that training may not help dogs living without them, while some dogs living with them require little formal training.
• Magic principle #1: Don’t be nuts!
• Magic principle #2: Puppies are baby dogs
• Magic principle #3: Exercise your dog
• Magic principle #4: Give your dog a job”
― Donald McCaig, Mr. and Mrs. Dog: Our Travels, Trials, Adventures, and Epiphanies

“Press. And especially my beloved Anne, whose courage never flagged.”
― Donald McCaig, Rhett Butler's People: The Authorized Novel based on Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind

“Most Mistress no more free do what they want than I is or Pork is or ary colored.”
― Donald McCaig, Ruth's Journey: The Authorized Novel of Mammy from Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind