Pack of Two Quotes

“Dogs possess a quality that's rare among humans--the ability to make you feel valued just by being you--and it was something of a miracle to me to be on the receiving end of all that acceptance. The dog didn't care what I looked like, or what I did for a living, or what a train wreck of a life I'd led before I got her, or what we did from day to day. She just wanted to be with me, and that awareness gave me a singular sensation of delight. I kept her in a crate at night until she was housebroken, and in the mornings I'd let her up onto the bed with me. She'd writhe with joy at that. She'd wag her tail and squirm all over me, lick my neck and face and eyes and ears, get her paws all tangled in my braid, and I'd just lie there, and I'd feel those oceans of loss from my past ebbing back, ebbing away, and I'd hear myself laugh out loud.”
― Caroline Knapp, Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs

“I'm 38 and I'm single and I'm having my most intense and gratifying relationship with a dog. But we all learn about love in different ways, and this way happens to be mine.”
― Caroline Knapp, Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs

“Life had this unmoored quality, full of voids and barely acknowledged yearnings, and if I'd made a list of things I wanted desperately at the time, it would have included the most elusive items. Love with ambivalence. Family members who won't leave. Intimacy that's not scary, that doesn't require a lot of anesthesia.”
― Caroline Knapp, Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs

“I think the healing power of dogs has less to do with what they give us than what they bring out in us, with what their presence allows us to feel and experience.”
― Caroline Knapp, Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs

“One thing I've noticed since I quit drinking is that a person usually has two or three sets of impulses scratching away at some internal door at any given time. If you're sober--if you're alert, and paying attention to those impulses, and not yielding to the instinct to anesthetize them--you can receive a lot of guidance about where to go, what to do next in life.”
― Caroline Knapp, Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs

“Loving a dog deeply does have a cellular quality, as though the most central part of you—your whole nervous system—gets tied into the bond, into the life you create together. You do get reprogrammed: a person with a dog becomes a dog person, with all the change that implies.”
― Caroline Knapp, Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs

“The dog-as-surrogate view implies that there are only two ways to inhabit the world, with other humans or without them, and it ignores the fact that sometimes you need both and sometimes you need a safe space somewhere in between. Dogs occupy that safe space; they make it possible.”
― Caroline Knapp, Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs

“Before you get a dog, you can't quite imagine what living with one might be like; afterward, you can't imagine living any other way. Life without Lucille? Unfathomable, to contemplate how quiet and still my home would be, and how much less laughter there'd be, and how unanchored I'd feel without her presence, the simple constancy of it.”
― Caroline Knapp, Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs

“What makes you feel empty and what makes you feel full? Who, or what, makes you feel connected or soothed or joyful? How much companionship do you need, and how much solitude? What feels right, what feels like enough? We all have to feel our way through those questions in life, and although she cannot provide the answers for me, I have the sense that Lucille is gently leading me toward them. I pick up that leash; I go forward.”
― Caroline Knapp, Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs

“And Grace—meeting Grace has been like discovering a long-lost sister, a kindred spirit who’s been out in the world all this time forging a nearly identical path.”
― Caroline Knapp, Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs

“Feels right: music to my ears. My therapist has tried to steer me toward that feeling for eons: forget about what you think you’re supposed to do, forget about what others expect you to do; what feels right, to you?”
― Caroline Knapp, Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs

“tend to side with the Monks of New Skete on the question of the canine desire to please: dogs, they say, care a lot less about pleasing humans than they care about pleasing themselves; if acting in a way that pleases you means something good will happen to them—they’ll get a biscuit, a reward, a pat on the back—they’re likely to be motivated to carry out the task, but their agenda is not necessarily driven by the pure and selfless wish to make you happy.”
― Caroline Knapp, Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs

“Vicky grew up the way I did, in the era of the yard dog. “We didn’t have dogs hanging around inside with us all day,” she says. “They pretty much lived outside. My mom let the dogs out in the morning, and they hung out in the yard all day, or someone left a gate open and they went roaming around the neighborhood until dinnertime. Sometimes the cops would call and say, ‘Hey, we’ve got your dog,’ and he’d be, like, in another town. We didn’t have leash laws. We didn’t really have to think about exercising the dog. We didn’t have to think about training the dog, for that matter. The dogs were just—you know, there.”
― Caroline Knapp, Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs

“In my view, dogs can be shamanistic, can be heroic and gentle and wise and enormously healing, but for the most part dogs are dogs, creatures governed by their own biological imperatives and codes of conduct, and we do both them and our relationships with them a disservice when we romanticize them.”
― Caroline Knapp, Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs

“I once heard a woman who’d lost her dog say that she felt as though a color were suddenly missing from her world: the dog had introduced to her field of vision some previously unavailable hue, and without the dog, that color was gone. That seemed to capture the experience of loving a dog with eminent simplicity. I’d amend it only slightly and say that if we are open to what they have to give us, dogs can introduce us to several colors, with names like wildness and nurturance and trust and joy.”
― Caroline Knapp, Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs