Jan Brattain

“Wait for you? Not likely. I've always had to run ahead of you and show you the way.”
― Robin Hobb, Fool's Errand

“But I want to extol not the sweetness nor the placidity of the dog, but the wilderness out of which he cannot step entirely, and from which we benefit. For wilderness is our first home too, and in our wild ride into modernity with all its concerns and problems we need also all the good attachments to that origin that we can keep or restore. Dog is one of the messengers of that rich and still magical first world. The dog would remind us of the pleasures of the body with its graceful physicality, and the acuity and rapture of the senses, and the beauty of forest and ocean and rain and our own breath. There is not a dog that romps and runs but we learn from him.

The other dog—the one that all its life walks leashed and obedient down the sidewalk—is what a chair is to a tree. It is a possession only, the ornament of a human life. Such dogs can remind us of nothing large or noble or mysterious or lost. They cannot make us sweeter or more kind.

Only unleashed dogs can do that. They are a kind of poetry themselves when they are devoted not only to us but to the wet night, to the moon and the rabbit-smell in the grass and their own bodies leaping forward.”
― Mary Oliver, Dog Songs: Poems

“You will go. And you will live a good life with my people. But bad things will happen. They always do. And when they do, you must not blame yourself. You must enjoy life in spite of bad things.”
― K.B. Laugheed, The Spirit Keeper

“Even far away, I know it's her by the way her dark hair tangles with the wind and how she stands on the red rocks of the Carving. She's more beautiful than snow.”
― Ally Condie, Crossed