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Dog Songs: Poems

Book by Mary Oliver · 5 quotes · Dogs, Animals, Love

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Dog Songs: Poems Quotes

“No, I mean really listen. Here's a story, and you don't have to visit many houses to find it. One person is talking, the other one is not really listening. someone can look like they are but they're actually thinking about something they want to say, or their minds are just wandering. Or they're looking at that little box people hold in their hands these days. And people get discouraged, so they quit trying. And the very quiet people, you may have noticed, are often the sad people.”

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“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.”

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“EVERY DOG’S STORY I have a bed, my very own. It’s just my size. And sometimes I like to sleep alone with dreams inside my eyes. But sometimes dreams are dark and wild and creepy and I wake and am afraid, though I don’t know why. But I’m no longer sleepy and too slowly the hours go by. So I climb on the bed where the light of the moon is shining on your face and I know it will be morning soon. Everybody needs a safe place.”

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