London's Number One Dog-Walking Agency Quotes

“Dogs sneak up on you like that, burying parts of themselves deep within you, bits that are only revealed later, once they are long gone. In full daylight, when you are doing something quite ordinary, one of these parts will be dug up again, quite by accident, and it will stop you in your tracks. Sometimes the memories will appear at night, in the dark, when they’re harder to get away from and it feels as if you might be smothered by the sadness of it all.”
― Kate MacDougall, London's Number One Dog-Walking Agency: A Memoir

“Dogs don’t really dwell on their physical ailments like humans do. They don’t feel sorry for themselves or try to apportion blame. They take what they have in the moment and just get on with it, eking out every last bit of enjoyment and taking every new day as it comes.”
― Kate MacDougall, London's Number One Dog-Walking Agency: A Memoir

“Working life seemed to be one enormous con to me, a deception so brilliant that it had reeled in entire generations of wide-eyed graduates bursting with ideas and energy and youthful enthusiasm, only to station them in front of photocopiers or laminators or shredders. It didn't really matter what your job title was or which company you worked for, most jobs seemed to boil down to moving bits of paper from A to B, appeasing unnecessarily awful people over the phone or email and staring incomprehensibly at spreadsheets.”
― Kate MacDougall, London's Number One Dog-Walking Agency

“Though I'd soon learn that most adult of truths: very few people have everything they want and even fewer know what they need.”
― Kate MacDougall, London's Number One Dog-Walking Agency: A Memoir – A True Love Letter to London, Dogs, and Growing Up with Wit and Charm

“As the months and years went on and I met more and more customers, I developed a good sense of who might be more trouble than they were worth but in those early days I had little appreciation of how tricky people could be and what to look out for.”
― Kate MacDougall, London's Number One Dog-Walking Agency: A Memoir – A True Love Letter to London, Dogs, and Growing Up with Wit and Charm

“When you have spent most of your young adult life surrounded by people and cushioned by structure - at school, at work, following timetables and deadlines and familiar routines - the abrupt silence that comes with working from home is utterly unnerving.”
― Kate MacDougall, London's Number One Dog-Walking Agency: A Memoir – A True Love Letter to London, Dogs, and Growing Up with Wit and Charm

“If you had a dog in New York, you also had a dog walker, in the same way that if you had parents, you had a therapist or if you had working limbs, a personal trainer. Americans are clever like that. They see a problem and then fix it with a sensible service while we tend to struggle on and tell ourselves we don't need the fuss.”
― Kate MacDougall, London's Number One Dog-Walking Agency: A Memoir – A True Love Letter to London, Dogs, and Growing Up with Wit and Charm

“Families are made by alchemy not design and often what makes them work, what makes them good, is fleeting and transitory and almost certainly indefinable. All except for that dog of course. That's the one real thing. The constant.”
― Kate MacDougall, London's Number One Dog-Walking Agency: A Memoir – A True Love Letter to London, Dogs, and Growing Up with Wit and Charm

“Being 'satisfied' in a job had always sounded rather disappointing to me - a sort of feeble acceptance of your servitude in return for the rent and wine and Danish pastries.”
― Kate MacDougall, London's Number One Dog-Walking Agency: A Memoir – A True Love Letter to London, Dogs, and Growing Up with Wit and Charm

“And there it was. 'Mabel's dad.' The horror of it, but also the utterly unexpected but totally unmistakable feeling of pride.”
― Kate MacDougall, London's Number One Dog-Walking Agency: A Memoir – A True Love Letter to London, Dogs, and Growing Up with Wit and Charm

“Failure at a task where you have tried, where your limits are set by your talent or your effort, always carries hope along with it. But failure by your body, when it's not doing what it is meant to be doing and there is nothing you can really do to change any of it, makes hope a bit harder to find.”
― Kate MacDougall, London's Number One Dog-Walking Agency: A Memoir – A True Love Letter to London, Dogs, and Growing Up with Wit and Charm

“Remarkable, really, that you never actually get positive feedback from the customers themselves, only via some third party.”
― Kate MacDougall, London's Number One Dog-Walking Agency: A Memoir – A True Love Letter to London, Dogs, and Growing Up with Wit and Charm

“Nothing is more gratifyingly grown-up than stairs.”
― Kate MacDougall, London's Number One Dog-Walking Agency: A Memoir – A True Love Letter to London, Dogs, and Growing Up with Wit and Charm

“But I just didn't want to go. I didn't want to do any of it - the jet, the cat, the new shiny dogs. I had finally reached the peak and I didn't even want to look at the view.”
― Kate MacDougall, London's Number One Dog-Walking Agency

“The bedroom would change, the way the kitchen smelled, the rules, but the dog was solid and stable and somehow glued us all together. When I think of that imaginary house, that frenetic”
― Kate MacDougall, London's Number One Dog-Walking Agency: A Memoir

“There was never a time when we didn’t have a dog, despite the fact that life could often be very disorderly and that a number of them got squashed on the road. My parents got divorced when I”
― Kate MacDougall, London's Number One Dog-Walking Agency: A Memoir

“She would then ask if everything was “OK” between Finlay and me.”
― Kate MacDougall, London's Number One Dog-Walking Agency: A Memoir

“You would have to be Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime to hold back a Labrador with its heart set on finding the perfect puddle and for Winston, it was vitally important that each and every one was tested for squelchiness, viscosity, and dankness of aroma. Winston was completely besotted by mud.”
― Kate MacDougall, London's Number One Dog-Walking Agency: A Memoir

“After all, the decisions that feel the most impulsive and whimsical, the ones that just seem to fall out of the sky, often have roots so long that they are wrapped around your bones.”
― Kate MacDougall, London's Number One Dog-Walking Agency