The Speckled Beauty Quotes

“He is just something that happened to us, in a time of loss and sadness and sickness and uncertainty, when, as the boy Little Arliss said in Old Yeller, we needed us a dog.”
― Rick Bragg, The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and His People

“I wonder how many dogs, in the short arc of their lives, have reset the way this one has? How many dogs, with such a tenuous grip on their own life, have touched the people around them as he has? I know I said, over and over, there was no magic in it, and I am not a man who goes through this life looking for evidence of fate, or karma, or listening for the flutter of angels. He is just something that happened to us, in a time of loss and sadness and sickness and uncertainty, when, as the boy little Arliss said in Old Yeller, we needed us a a dog.”
― Rick Bragg, The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and His People

“Sometimes you put yourself in a place in your life when a dog is the best company you can have.”
― Rick Bragg, The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and His People

“But I don't think any dog knows home better than one thrown anway once already.”
― Rick Bragg, The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and His People

“I would have liked to stick my toes in the sand, or ride a tall horse. Today, I will go buy fifty pounds of cat food, and like it.”
― Rick Bragg, The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and His People

“I believe a cast-off dog does not easily forget the life it had before.”
― Rick Bragg, The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and His People

“Some men were just born beside a river of melancholy. Some men lived a lifetime there.”
― Rick Bragg, The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and His People

“Goodnight, buddy,” I always say, then, always, “I’ll see you in the morning.”

I say it like I have some control over it all. Most nights, before I close my eyes, I hear a ruckus out there in the leaves, hear that urgent bark, and I stumble out the door, to rescue some innocent possum, or treed cat, or just to poke my head out the door so he will see me and know that I have registered his diligence, that I have entered it into whatever ledger it is he thinks I keep; he just knows there is one.

Did you see me?

And he knows he will never be invisible, again.”
― Rick Bragg, The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and His People

“He is a terrible burden, or at least that is something I have come to say. I guess the truth is that he does not truly ask for much in return. He just wants some people of his own, and some snacks, because a dog gets used to things like that. He wants a big, tangled place to run and hunt, and if it happens to be overrun with jackasses he will do his best to keep them in check, though you know how they can be. He wants a place to lie, a place outside where he can hear and smell the mountain as he closes his eyes, and wants a booger to battle deep in the black trees. And he wants someone to come let him in, when the thunder shakes the mountain, when the lightning flash reveals that he was just a dog all this time, just a dog after all.”
― Rick Bragg, The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and His People

“Does he bite?” the driver asked.

“He even bites me,” I said.

He picked a fight with whatever the world brought him, and that day it happened to be a Lincoln. I don’t think he would have hurt the driver, but he sure would have messed up a nice suit.

The next week he did it again, and the next.”
― Rick Bragg, The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and His People

“I am beginning to think that the word “no,” in his mind, registers as, Well, go ahead and do whatever you want to do. He backed straight away, pulling, and the collar slipped over his head. I tried to grab him by the scruff of the neck, but he evaded me and leapt back onto the bed, and burrowed under the blanket till he was just a big, growling lump. He is an outside dog, he rolls in mule manure. It wasn’t that I would have to change the bed. I might have to burn it.”
― Rick Bragg, The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and His People

“The dog wagged his tail, happy, it seemed, to find it still worked properly. He was not frightened, or glum. He had tortured a stupid cat, twice, and torn up not one fence, but two; it might have been one of the greatest days of his life, and the week hadn’t even gotten started good.”
― Rick Bragg, The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and His People

“When Geraldine was still just a little girl, she come to our house with Louvadie… and Daddy saw all them freckles, just hundreds and hundreds of ‘em, and he named her right then and there. He said, ‘Why, she’s a speckled beauty.’ I guess he wanted to make her feel better, you know, about her being homely. And that’s what we’ll call you. But not ‘cause you’re ugly, but ‘cause of all your freckles. We’ll call you Speckled Beautry.”
― Rick Bragg, The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and His People

“He wanted to come down,” the old woman shouts from the stairs, and I wonder when the wishes of this terrible dog began to override everything in our lives.”
― Rick Bragg, The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and His People

“They were all buried quickly, quietly, without the attention, the traditions, they deserved, the way people always are in a time of plague”
― Rick Bragg, The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and His People

“Around the cabin, you can smell woodsmoke on the breeze. The people burn their brush piles a day or two after the first chilly rain, build their first fires in the fireplace. As much as the red and gold leaves on the mountainside, it is how you know the holidays are coming near.”
― Rick Bragg, The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and His People

“You’re the guy they depend on when things go bad, when they need somebody to pull them out of the ditch, or clear the road with your chainsaw, or jump them off in the middle of the night. “People will line up to say this stuff over you, like they did Grandpa,” I said. My kin could recall how they could see the headlights coming for miles down those twisting mountain roads, the night he left this earth.”
― Rick Bragg, The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and His People

“People will remember you,” I said, “remember what you did and what you said. They’ll remember the truck you drove, and the fish you caught and the ball you played…and they’ll remember you took care of your momma and your baby brothers in a cold house with no food on the table…,” and when we finally fled that life, down a railroad track in the dark, he walked in front, because even though he was seven years old he was already more grown than most people ever got, but somehow I couldn’t get that part said. “Well,” he said, “ain’t that ever’body?”
― Rick Bragg, The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and His People

“I came home because I was on the run, again, and stayed because of a sense of duty. He comes here every night and every weekend because he loves it here, loves the woods, pasture, pond, and all the hard work it takes to manage it. Here in this wide-open space, from the seat of a tractor or leaning on a pasture gate, things make sense. He is serenaded by katydids and crickets, swarmed by green flies, wasps, hornets, and worse, but it is a kind of paradise for him, I believe. He has bounced over every inch of it on that hateful tractor, the closest he could come to crossing it on muleback. So,”
― Rick Bragg, The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and His People

“We don’t walk around telling people we are depressed, or that we suffer from anxiety. If a person gets down, they keep working, living. It’s not real if you can’t put a cast on it, or a built-up shoe, or a truss. No one, in the history of my family, has ever called their boss at the cotton mill or the steel plant to say, Hey, Earl, I won’t be in to work today. I’m working through some unresolved issues with my mother. Tell Homer to take over on the forklift. And if you do lay out of work, you better”
― Rick Bragg, The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and His People

“But I knew, as I staggered down that hill with that awful dog, what the unreliable men in my family have always known: that this ol’ life can be a bleak, sorry, boring slog, if you take the time, at every turn, to think it through. { Three } Tough Guys The dog lay in the garage as I cleaned off the mud and old blood with a rag.”
― Rick Bragg, The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and His People

“You get to thinking of a place as yours, after a while, and you grit your teeth over the Red Bull cans and Mountain Dew bottles and takeout chicken bones scattered through one of the prettiest places on earth. But while any half-wit can toss their trash out into a country road, it takes a rarefied, soulless son of a bitch to slink out here to throw away a good dog. He”
― Rick Bragg, The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and His People