Leland > Leland's Quotes

“I write only because
There is a voice within me
That will not be still”
― Sylvia Plath, Letters Home

“Mine. It's all mine.”
― Angelo Dirks

“All his life he tried to be a good person. Many times, however, he failed.
For after all, he was only human. He wasn't a dog.”
― Charles M. Schulz

“Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute. Indeed, my experiments have proven to me that he is the Unreasoning Animal... In truth, man is incurably foolish. Simple things which other animals easily learn, he is incapable of learning. Among my experiments was this. In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends. I put them in a cage. In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit. In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel and some doves. Finally a monkey. They lived together in peace; even affectionately.

Next, in another cage I confined an Irish Catholic from Tipperary, and as soon as he seemed tame I added a Scotch Presbyterian from Aberdeen. Next a Turk from Constantinople; a Greek Christian from Crete; an Armenian; a Methodist from the wilds of Arkansas; a Buddhist from China; a Brahman from Benares. Finally, a Salvation Army Colonel from Wapping. Then I stayed away for two whole days. When I came back to note results, the cage of Higher Animals was all right, but in the other there was but a chaos of gory odds and ends of turbans and fezzes and plaids and bones and flesh--not a specimen left alive. These Reasoning Animals had disagreed on a theological detail and carried the matter to a Higher Court.”
― Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth: Uncensored Writings

“Dogs are minor angels, and I don't mean that facetiously. They love unconditionally, forgive immediately, are the truest of friends, willing to do anything that makes us happy, etcetera. If we attributed some of those qualities to a person we would say they are special. If they had ALL of them, we would call them angelic. But because it's "only" a dog, we dismiss them as sweet or funny but little more. However when you think about it, what are the things that we most like in another human being? Many times those qualities are seen in our dogs every single day-- we're just so used to them that we pay no attention.”
― Jonathan Carroll

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“Friendship love. This is a very special thing. It’s the sort of love where you know another being’s strengths and weaknesses, perfections and imperfections, and you love the whole package.”
― Angelo Dirks, Seven Dogs in Heaven

“Big love is the kind of love that takes in more than the self. It’s love for something bigger than the self. It’s love of God, of the universe, of the family, of the pack, of the tribe. It inspires courage and selflessness in those who know it.”
― Angelo Dirks, Seven Dogs in Heaven

“Because we need each other. We complete each other. Duty works both ways. Love needs a beloved. Loyalty needs two to be loyalty. Fidelity is nothing without someone to be faithful to. Every dog needs a human, and every human needs a dog.”
― Angelo Dirks

“When imagination changes from hoping to knowing, it makes things real.”
― Angelo Dirks, Seven Dogs in Heaven

“Duty is doing the right thing, at the right time, for the right reasons, without regard to the cost to one’s self.”
― Angelo Dirks, Seven Dogs in Heaven

“You humans always try to make things too simple, except when you’re trying to make things too complicated. You can never just be with what is.”
― Angelo Dirks, Seven Dogs in Heaven

“Hero love?” I was puzzled. “You know. The kind of love you have for someone you want to be like: Marines, astronauts, cowboys, teachers, big brothers, that sort of thing. You love them because they represent the you that you want to be.”
― Leland Dirks, Seven Dogs in Heaven

“For a writer, it seems a help rather than a hindrance to be at least a little crazy. Who but a crazy person would carve out a very private, quiet place in the world, only to pour his/her innermost thoughts and emotions onto a page for the entire world to examine? Even in fiction, we give a map to our most secret feelings. Why do writers do it? Perhaps because we'd be crazier still if we didn't.”
― Leland Dirks

“You are not as great or terrible as you think you are. Neither are they.”
― JD Mader

“Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.”
― W.H. Auden

“I do not concern myself with my inability to feel such comfort amidst humans (other than with very few friends and family), but, rather, am simply thankful that at least dogs exist, and I’m humbly aware of how much less a person I’d be – how less a human – if they did not exist. ”
― Rick Bass, Colter: The True Story of the Best Dog I Ever Had – A Memoir of Raging Genius, Loyal Spirit, and Canine Companionship in Montana

“They were at the wrong place at the wrong time naturally they became heroes”
― George Lucas, Star Wars: A New Hope

“There's always a story. It's all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything's got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.”
― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

“One grateful thought is a ray of sunshine.  A hundred such thoughts paint a sunrise.  A thousand will rival the glaring sky at noonday - for gratitude is light against the darkness.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway: Quotes, Verse, & Grumblings for Every Day of the Year

“Sunrise over the mountain-forest was gorgeous - Aurora brushing out her golden tresses with a comb of dark-needled pine and bare-limbed oak.”
― J. Aleksandr Wootton, The Eighth Square

“You can’t really, truly love a thing. Love is only possible between beings or groups of beings. Love of a thing doesn’t work because it can’t love back.”
― Leland Dirks, Seven Dogs in Heaven

“I've had rainbows in my clouds.”
― Maya Angelou

“You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them. Try to be a rainbow in someone's cloud. Do not complain. Make every effort to change things you do not like. If you cannot make a change, change the way you have been thinking. You might find a new solution.”
― Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter

“And the yellow sunflower by the brook, in autumn beauty stood.”
― William Cullen Bryant

“later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?

it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere.”
― Warsan Shire

“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each day. And if you were found with a book, it was an automatic death penalty. She had gotten hold of a copy of ‘Gone With the Wind’, and she would take three or four hours out of her sleeping time each night to read. And then, during the hour or so when they were sewing the next day, she would tell them all the story. These girls were risking certain death for a story. And when she told me that story herself, it actually made what I do feel more important. Because giving people stories is not a luxury. It’s actually one of the things that you live and die for.”
― Neil Gaiman

“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”
― Voltaire

“The rhetoric of ‘law and order’ was first mobilized in the late 1950s as Southern governors and law enforcement officials attempted to generate and mobilize white opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, civil rights activists used direct-action tactics in an effort to force reluctant Southern States to desegregate public facilities. Southern governors and law enforcement officials often characterized these tactics as criminal and argued that the rise of the Civil Rights Movement was indicative of a breakdown of law and order. Support of civil rights legislation was derided by Southern conservatives as merely ‘rewarding lawbreakers.’
For more than a decade – from the mid 1950s until the late 1960s – conservatives systematically and strategically linked opposition to civil rights legislation to calls for law and order, arguing that Martin Luther King Jr.’s philosophy of civil disobedience was a leading cause of crime.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness