Albert Payson Terhune > Quotes

“Win without boasting. Lose without excuse.”
― Albert Payson Terhune

“Any man with money to make the purchase may become a dog's owner. But no man --spend he ever so much coin and food and tact in the effort-- may become a dog's Master without consent of the dog. Do you get the difference? And he whom a dog once unreservedly accepts as Master is forever that dog's God.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Lad: A Dog

“Soon or late, every dog's master's memory becomes a graveyard; peopled by wistful little furry ghosts that creep back unbidden, at times, to a semblance of their olden lives.”
― Albert Payson Terhune

“This is the magic secret of dog training -- lose control over yourself and you at once lose control of the dog. Your strongest and most irresistible weapon is iron patience.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Gray Dawn

“Some proverbs live because they are too true to die. Others endure because they have a smug sound and nobody has bothered to bury them.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Further Adventures of Lad

“Deene had a refreshing ignorance concerning collies; and indeed of nineteen dog-breeds out of twenty. But he had an equally refreshing faith in himself to give wise decisions on any and all canine matters. So, obligingly, he consented to judge collies at Greenwold in addition to his beloved and ultra-tiny Chihuahuas. A similar thing has been done too often to call for comment.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Wolf

“If more folks were afraid to keep dogs, there'd be easier pickings for them that make their living by what they can find in folks' houses at night.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, The Faith Of A Collie

“Any man with money to make the purchase may become a dog’s owner. But no man—spend he ever so much coin and food and tact in the effort—may become a dog’s Master without the consent of the dog. Do you get the difference? And he whom a dog once unreservedly accepts as Master is forever that dog’s God.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Lad: A Dog

“An Indian told them the mountain didn’t want to be climbed—that it cut the rope itself in some mystic way, to keep from being explored—that it grudged anyone discovering its summit. And ‘Grudge Mountain’ it has been, from that day.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Dog of the High Sierras

“Gray Dawn is one of the most lovable collies of all long Sunnybank line. He is not merely the professionally faithful dog of fiction, but rather—as the Mistress expresses it—an “own-your-own-soul dog.”

Within a pitifully small handful of years, at very most he will be gone. That is the way of dogs. All of them die too soon; though so many of us humans live too long. While still he is here, I want his stories to be read. Perhaps you may not like the stories. But I know you will like Dawn, himself. Everyone does.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Gray Dawn

“All dogs die too soon. Many humans don't die soon enough. A dog is only a dog. And a dog is too gorgeously normal and wholesome to be made ridiculous in death by his owner's sloppy sentimentality.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, The Heart of a Dog

“When Lad died, in September of 1918, I collected the ten or twelve yarns I had written about him, and I tried to sell the collection as a book under the name, Lad: A Dog. I was told that there had been no worthwhile dog books since Bob, Son Of Battle and The Call Of The Wild and that the public did not want that kind of fiction. There was no demand; there was no possible profit. Any volume with a canine hero was foredoomed to fall flat.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, The Best Loved Dog Stories of Albert Payson Terhune

“He ain't never been hit, nor yet swore at. An' he don't need to be. Treat him nice, like he's used to bein' treated. An' don't get sore on him if he mopes fer me, jes' at fust. Because he's sure to. Dogs ain't like folks. They got hearts. Folks has only got souls. I guess dogs has the best of it, at that.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, His Dog

“Again and again he would lie down at her feet; only to waken presently with a thunderous growl and a snarl, and with a lunge of bared teeth at her caressing hand. The hand would continue to caress; and his show of fury was met with a laugh and with a comment:
"You've had a good sleep, and now you've waked up in a nice homicidal rage.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, The Heart of a Dog

“If Ihad a third foot,” mused the Master, ‘I'd kick myself with it. It’s bad enough to be unjust to a fellow-man. But it’s worse to treat a dog as I treated Wolf. Because 1 can’t explain to him or apologize or anything, He—”

“Don’t worry,” counseled the Mistress. “See, he’s forgiven you already. When God put dogs into this unjust world of ours, He gave them power of divine forgiveness; to make up to them for all the injustice they were going to receive. Sometimes I think perhaps that puts dogs just a little bit above us humans.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Wolf

“If you had let him alone, he’d have let you alone,” retorted Friend. “When you laid hands on him he got back at you. I don’t blame him. Any human would have done the same if he’d been mauled by a stranger he didn’t like. You can’t expect a dog to act more civilized than a human, can you? (Not so very much more civilized, anyhow.) And while we’re talking about it, I’ll ask you not to call the Big Dog a ‘cur’ any more. He’s a thoroughbred. And he’s more of a gentleman than ever you’ll be in a hundred years. Now get back to your work.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Lad of Sunnybank

“There are easier ways, you know, of showing how much inferior you are to a dog than by kicking him.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Buff: A Collie and Other Dog Stories

“He was Sunnybank Lad; eighty-pound collie; tawny and powerful; with absurdly tine white forepaws and with a Soul looking out from his deep-set dark eyes. Chum and housemate he was to two human gods; - a dog, alone of all worshipers, having the privilege of looking on the face of his gods and of communing with them without the medium of priest or of prayer.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Further Adventures of Lad

“All my life I have made an intensive study of dogs. Thirty years ago I knew everything about them that could be known, and much more. After three decades of much closer study of them and their ways, I find to my dismay that I know almost nothing at all about them. I have scarcely scratched the surface. That is not false modesty. It is sickeningly true.

The sum total of my canine knowledge and experience and observation is this: Anything can happen; and usually it does.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, The Critter and Other Dogs

“The Master talked of buying a whalebone-and-steel-and-snow bull terrier, or a more formidable if more greedy Great Dane. But the Mistress wanted a collie. So they compromised by getting the collie.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, The Heart of a Dog

“There is no more merciless mental vivisector unhanged than Marcia Kibbe Klaw. Compared to her ice-bright scalpel, Balzac and Thackeray wielded wands of whipped-cream and swans-down.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, An Albert Payson Terhune Reader

“Well, with no irreverence, let me tell you that the Prophet was no more powerfully guarded than am I, And by the Unseen. If a thief—if a gang of roughs—yes, if a whole army of marauders should dare lay a finger on me, I have a power that could crush them as easily as I could crush a caterpillar, I have an unseen power that perhaps no other mortal knows of. It keeps me safer from enemies than could a machine-gun company. Yes, and it could destroy a machine-gun company.”

‘He is crazy, after all!” thought Gwen, unhappily. “A monomaniac. Poor, poor old man!”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Unseen!

“Buff paused beneath a shut and locked window, some three feet from the ground. He gathered his waning strength f
or one more effort, and sprang upward.
Through the thin and cracked glass and the rotting sash he chose his way, alighting on the slimy concrete floor of the garage amid a shower of window particles.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Buff: A Collie and Other Dog Stories

“The dog’s plumed tail was smiting the dusty floor of the baggage car with happily resounding thumps as Abner talked to him. The man’s voice and intonation were such as an animal likes. The collie licked the calloused hand that stroked his silken head. Mutely, a bond of chumship was established between the dog-lonely man and the ill-treated dog.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, My Friend the Dog

“The clergyman had held field services in France when the shells were dropping all about his khaki congregation. Thus, the advent of a huge and muddily shaggy dog did not throw him off his mental balance in the mere reading of a marriage service.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Lad of Sunnybank

“But of a sudden his head went up; his stiff-poised brush broke into swift wagging; his lips curled down. He had recognized that his prospective foe was not of his own sex. (And nowhere, except among humans, does a full-grown male ill-treat or even defend himself against the female of his species.)”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Lad: A Dog

“Something had to be done. Apart from robbing a bank—a line of endeavor for which I lacked the needful preliminary training—I saw no way to get ahead in the world except by forcing some kind of opening for myself as a fiction writer. Thenceforth, for several years, I set aside five hours a night, five nights a week, for this kind of work. After my nine-hour office day, I came home, got a shower and a rubdown; and as soon as dinner was ended, I went to my desk and began writing.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, The Best Loved Dog Stories of Albert Payson Terhune

“There was a mysteriously comforting companionship in the dog's presence. Link found himself talking to him from time to time as to a fellow human. And the words did not echo back in eerie hollowness from the walls, as when he had sometimes sought to ease his desolation by talking aloud to himself.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, His Dog

“Meanwhile I was teaching him, by patient training, the few needful things I wanted him to learn. Also I was giving him sweeping uphill gallops to deepen his chest and broaden his shoulders and establish his straightness of limb and complete bodily poise I sought for him. Incidentally, I was giving him two raw eggs and a pound of fresh raw beef a day, in addition to his regular kennel rations of bread and milk and bones, and I was grooming his blanket-like coat as one would groom a racehorse.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, The Critter and Other Dogs

“Laund was oblivious to the fivefold punishment the very hint of which had hitherto been enough to send him ki-yi-ing under Danny’s bed. He was not fighting for himself, but for the child who was at once his ward and his deity.
On himself he was taking the torture that otherwise must have been inflicted on Danny. For perhaps the millionth time in the history of mankind and of dog, the Scriptural adage was fulfilled, and perfect love was casting out fear.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, My Friend the Dog