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Already and unexpectedly, she has changed me as a person and as a writer. I am only beginning to understand the nature of those changes and where they will lead me.
she would stare into my eyes as long as I wanted to meet hers—ten minutes, twenty, thirty—and she would rarely be the first to look away.
I can say that I frequently saw in her eyes a yearning to make herself understood in a complex way that only speech could facilitate.
The recognition that words have meaning, the desire to remember them, the intention to act on those that are understood—does all of this lead to the conclusion that the dog also yearns to speak?
“You’re really an angel,” I continued.
I was dealing here with the ineffable, the pursuit of which offers endless frustration but no reward other than the thrill of the chase.
We don’t have paranormal experiences or go to psychics. We don’t even read our daily horoscopes.
Truth is always stranger than fiction. We craft fiction to match our sense of how things ought to be, but truth cannot be crafted. Truth is, and truth has a way of astonishing us to our knees, reminding us that the universe does not exist to fulfill our expectations.
Trixie was innocent and joyful, but also at times enigmatic and solemn. I learned as much from this good dog as from all my years in school.
Then in my senior year, along came Gerda Cerra.
Financially, that was an iffy year for us, and we worked long hours. But we were happy because we were together.
“You want to be a full-time writer,” she said. “So quit teaching. I’ll support us for five years. If you can’t make it in five years, you never will make
By 1980, success began to come. Twenty-nine years later, as I write this, worldwide sales of my novels are approaching four hundred million copies. Critics have been largely kind, readers even kinder.
If done with diligence and integrity, work is obedience to divine order, a form of repentance.
A dog can be a living work of art, a constant reminder of the exquisite design and breathtaking detail of nature, beauty on four paws.
in September of 1998, a dog finally entered our lives.
Of all the agents of this world that have changed me for the better, this dog takes second place only to Gerda, and she brought as much to Gerda as to me.
I am fortunate that I am enchanted by language and find meaning in my work.
Over the years, we have learned that the most important quality anyone can possess is character.
When given the command “under,” she settled under the table, facing out, and watched the other diners.
When you are even to a small degree a public figure, it is especially important that the people interacting with the world on your behalf should be liked and respected by everyone with whom they deal.
G. K. Chesterton—who had two dogs, Winkle and Quoodle—wrote more than a little about the importance of laughter in a well-lived life, and of laughter’s role in a marriage, he said: “A man and a woman cannot live together without having against each other a kind of everlasting joke. Each has discovered that the other is not only a fool, but a great fool.” Dogs love to play the fool, and as part of the family, they are quite capable of recognizing the fool in us, and of celebrating it with a joke now and then.
We learned with Pinnacle that she enjoyed the limelight. She did everything asked of her—walk here, walk there, turn this way, sit, smile—as if instead of going through assistance-dog training, she had attended modeling school. She was in fact a camera hound.
Trixie inspired me to look at things from a new perspective, made the familiar fresh again, somehow shared with me her recognition of great beauty in mundane scenes, and reawakened in me an awareness of the mystery that is woven into the warp and weft of everything we perceive with our five senses but can know only with our hearts.
As anyone who has ever opened his heart and mind to a dog knows, these creatures have emotions very like our own.
little in life is as satisfying as keeping promises.
With its tail, a dog talks to other dogs, to people, to cats, to all manner of creatures.
The faster the tail moved, the more she approved of the person before her.
Dogs study us their whole lives and learn the meaning of our tiniest changes of expression and voice inflection.
With her refined nose, Trixie could identify which humans and dogs were trouble—and which were not.
On the other hand, dogs eat with gusto, play with exuberance, work happily when given the opportunity, surrender themselves to the wonder and the mystery of their world, and love extravagantly. Envy infects the human heart; if we envy, next we covet, and what we covet becomes the object of our all-consuming avarice. If we live without envy, with the humility and the joyful gratitude of dogs—nachos! ball! cuddle time!—we will be ready even for Death when he comes for us, content that we have made good use of the gift of life.
By Trixie’s striking intelligence, by her sense of humor, by the uncanny moments when she seemed to reveal a spiritual dimension, she renewed my sense of the mystery of life.
For a dog, the world is an ever-expanding carnival of mysteries. Every new experience enchants, and every morning is full of promise.
wisdom without wonder is not true wisdom at all, but only a set of practical skills married to tactical shrewdness of one degree or another.
Wonder inspires curiosity, and curiosity keeps the mind from becoming sick with irrational ideologies and stultified with dogma.
The beautiful machine of natural law, of which I hoped to have a glimpse, remained hidden from me for a long time.
Seeing through to the truth under the illusions that have shaped you is important, but it can be dispiriting and can tie knots in your wonder.
I felt a tide of creativity breaking me loose from the encrusting barnacles of thirty years of storytelling.
The greater challenge of these new books brought me enormous pleasure that at times approached a sustained rapture.
The absurdity of Evil and of those who serve it is the source of our greatest defense against darkness: laughter.
Consciously and unconsciously, the intelligent being searches for meaning and seeks its purpose. This effort cannot be pointless, because Nature inspires it in us, and Nature is never wasteful.
Nature does not waste, and if intelligent beings by their very nature seek meaning, then there must be meaning to be found.
Dogs’ joy is directly related to the fact that they do not deceive, do not betray, and do not covet. Innocence is neither naive nor unhip; innocence is the condition of deepest bliss.
Considering the potentially momentous nature of even the smallest decisions we make, we ought to be terrified and humbled, we ought to be filled with gratitude for every grace we receive.
The great advantages of a mutual language and a shared culture fail us daily in our efforts to understand our own kind.
When you have dogs, you witness their uncomplaining acceptance of suffering, their bright desire to make the most of life in spite of the limitations of age and disease, their calm awareness of the approaching end when their final hours come.
She has taught them to smell cancer in a patient so early that the usual medical tests cannot yet detect the disease, and experiments in this area are ongoing.
You see as well the truth and the hope of life best expressed in the first and last lines of T.S. Eliot’s “East Coker,” part of Four Quartets: “In my beginning is my end … in my end is my beginning.” I am born to die, but I trust that I die to live again.
The world never made sense until we were together, and I can’t see how it would make sense if I had to live without her.
Loyalty, unfailing love, instant forgiveness, a humble sense of his place in the scheme of things, a sense of wonder—these and other virtues of a dog arise from his innocence.
