Many of the qualities that come so effortlessly to dogs - loyalty, devotion, selflessness, unflagging optimism, unqualified love - can be elusive to humans.

Animal lovers are a special breed of humans, generous of spirit, full of empathy, perhaps a little prone to sentimentality, and with hearts as big as a cloudless sky

It's just the most amazing thing to love a dog, isn't it? It makes our relationships with people seem as boring as a bowl of oatmeal.

A dog doesn't care if you're rich or poor, educated or illiterate, clever or dull. Give him your heart and he will give you his.

He taught us the art of unqualified love. How to give it, how to accept it. Where there is that, most other pieces fall into place.

Such short little lives our pets have to spend with us, and they spend most of it waiting for us to come home each day.

Dogs are great. Bad dogs, if you can really call them that, are perhaps the greatest of them all.

If you still think you're a young pup then you are, no matter what the calendar says

A person can learn a lot from a dog, even a loopy one like ours. Marley taught me about living each day with unbridled exuberance and joy, about seizing the moment and following your heart.

. . . owning a dog always ended with this sadness because dogs just don't live as long as people do.

There's no such thing as a bad dog, just a bad owner.

If I knew then what I know now I guess it'd make no difference

Memory is a time capsule

My fate is like those envelopes – sealed and tossed aside.

Matthew licked the fright induced sweat from his victim’s temple then bit a quarter sized piece of flesh from her right cheek as she flayed wildly under him.

I'm close with my parents. I have a lot of acquaintances, but my very good close friends are few I can count my very good friends on one hand. And that's how I like it to be.

Everybody thinks that this civilization has lasted a very long time but it really does take very few grandfathers' granddaughters to take us back to the dark ages.

The century which we are entering can be and must be the century of the common man.

If no one hates it no one really loves it

With every word, I drop knowledge. I'm a diamond in the rough, a shiny piece of coal trying to reach my goal.

I call the Lancashire trade immoral, because it was raised and is sustained on the ruin of millions of India's peasants.