Tom Ryan > Quotes

“I was not a religious man, but if I were, the woods would be my church, the mountaintops my altar.”
― Tom Ryan, Following Atticus: Forty-Eight High Peaks, One Little Dog, and an Extraordinary Friendship

“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.”
― Tom Ryan, Following Atticus: Forty-Eight High Peaks, One Little Dog, and an Extraordinary Friendship

“Magic is where you find it; the only thing that matters is that you take the time to look for it. It can be the wonder in a little dog’s face or the memory of an old man.”
― Tom Ryan, Following Atticus: Forty-Eight High Peaks, One Little Dog, and an Extraordinary Friendship

“J. M. Barrie, who wrote Peter Pan, said, “We never understand how little we need in this world until we know the loss of it.”
― Tom Ryan, Following Atticus: Forty-Eight High Peaks, One Little Dog, and an Extraordinary Friendship

“But that’s the thing about adventures—you’re invited to take a chance without knowing the outcome, and all that matters is that you say yes.”
― Tom Ryan, Following Atticus: Forty-Eight High Peaks, One Little Dog, and an Extraordinary Friendship

“When we come to an edge we come to a frontier that tells us that we are now about to become more than we have been before.”
― Tom Ryan, Following Atticus: Forty-Eight High Peaks, One Little Dog, and an Extraordinary Friendship

“It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure. —JOSEPH CAMPBELL”
― Tom Ryan, Following Atticus: Forty-Eight High Peaks, One Little Dog, and an Extraordinary Friendship

“The first time I put the suit on him, we were in the store, and immediately he looked like he’d been to a taxidermist. He stood stiff as a freshly stuffed dog. He wouldn’t move his head. He wouldn’t even move his eyes. And he stood like this for a couple of minutes in the middle of the store. Nothing I could do would get him to budge. I knelt next to him and gave him the tiniest of nudges, hoping this would throw off his balance and cause him to move a leg for support. Nothing. I did it again. Nothing. I did it again, a little firmer. Still nothing. I did it a little firmer yet, and this time, instead of moving his legs to keep his balance, he toppled over onto his side—a dead, stuffed dog with stiff legs. The cause of death was humiliation; rigor mortis was immediate.”
― Tom Ryan, Following Atticus: Forty-Eight High Peaks, One Little Dog, and an Extraordinary Friendship

“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.”
― Tom Ryan, Following Atticus: Forty-Eight High Peaks, One Little Dog, and an Extraordinary Friendship

“The deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless, it is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept. Not that we discover a new unity. We discover an older unity. . . . We are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are.”
― Tom Ryan, Following Atticus: Forty-Eight High Peaks, One Little Dog, and an Extraordinary Friendship

“Perhaps love is the process of my gently leading you back to yourself.” For that’s what that little dog did. He led, I followed, and in the end I became the man I dreamed of being when I was a little boy. So they went off together. But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing. —A. A. MILNE, THE HOUSE AT POOH CORNER”
― Tom Ryan, Following Atticus: Forty-Eight High Peaks, One Little Dog, and an Extraordinary Friendship

“Death, like birth, was part of the package of life. She had come to peace with that. It was those of us who were left behind who struggled with it.”
― Tom Ryan, Following Atticus: Forty-Eight High Peaks, One Little Dog, and an Extraordinary Friendship

“There are some days that are perfect, not so much for what is accomplished as for what is felt and will always be remembered.”
― Tom Ryan, Following Atticus: Forty-Eight High Peaks, One Little Dog, and an Extraordinary Friendship

“the poet William Irwin Thompson wrote: “When we come to an edge we come to a frontier that tells us that we are now about to become more than we have been before.” For”
― Tom Ryan, Following Atticus: Forty-Eight High Peaks, One Little Dog, and an Extraordinary Friendship

“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. —EDWARD ABBEY”
― Tom Ryan, Following Atticus: Forty-Eight High Peaks, One Little Dog, and an Extraordinary Friendship

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― Tom Ryan, Following Atticus: Forty-Eight High Peaks, One Little Dog, and an Extraordinary Friendship

“There was one last question I had for her. I’d always been curious about her first piece of advice on raising Atticus: Carry him everywhere you go, and don’t let anyone else hold him that first month. “That worked so well. I tell everyone who gets a puppy that they should do it. Where does it come from, Paige?” There was a pause on the other end of the phone, as if she were wondering whether she really wanted to tell me, and then in a soft, vulnerable voice she said, “That’s the way I always wanted to be loved, Tom.”
― Tom Ryan, Following Atticus: Forty-Eight High Peaks, One Little Dog, and an Extraordinary Friendship

“We never understand how little we need in this world until we know the loss of it.” The”
― Tom Ryan, Following Atticus: Forty-Eight High Peaks, One Little Dog, and an Extraordinary Friendship