Home > Work > Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs

Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs QUOTES

Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs QUOTES

1 " The problem is - we own our lives, sure. But our lives don’t belong only to us.

And yet, we are here to tell our stories in this way to make sense of our lives. So how do you tell a story when you know that telling it will bring other people sorrow? Is it better, in the end, to just be silent? "

― Jennifer Finney Boylan , Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs

2 " Don't you know that this is the only reason we are here, to love one another, and to be loved? Why is it that what is so obvious to dogs is such a mystery to men and women? "

― Jennifer Finney Boylan , Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs

3 " Days in a house with children grind by like glaciers, but the years rush by like wind. "

― Jennifer Finney Boylan , Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs

4 " And yet, as it turns out, nothing is harder than loving human beings. In part, this is because we don't know what we want. Or, on those unlikely occasions when we do know what we want, we often don't know how to put our desire into words. Instead, a lot of the time we act like my old friend Gomer, snarling and slathering at the end of our chains, driven to fury not only by our imprisonment but also by the presence of others who appear to us to be undeservedly walking free. "

― Jennifer Finney Boylan , Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs

5 " Don't you know that this is the only reason we are here, to love one another, and to be loved? "

― Jennifer Finney Boylan , Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs

6 " But there were times when I remembered my younger self the way you’d remember a dear friend you’d lost, for reasons you no longer quite understood. "

― Jennifer Finney Boylan , Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs

7 " Sometimes my sister and I laugh so hard that we fall upon the floor, unable to speak or move, just shaking so hard that it is not clear if we are going to be able to survive our own happiness. It makes it hard to breathe. "

― Jennifer Finney Boylan , Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs

8 " If you've never experienced a sense of dysphoria with your own body, all I can say is, Lucky you. But just because you have not experienced this yourself does not mean it is not real in the hearts of others. "

― Jennifer Finney Boylan , Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs

9 " I learned the terrible truth that as we morph from self to self over time, the love that one self has sworn can seem unfathomable to another. "

― Jennifer Finney Boylan , Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs

10 " There are an infinite number of ways to be female on this planet, just as there are an infinite number of ways to be human, and my belief is that all of them are cool. If my experience and Janet's, for instance, are very different, that makes neither one of us one speck less - or more, for that matter - female.
If there is room for Dolly Parton, and room for my aunt Erna, and for Janet, then surely there ought to be room for me.
I mention all of this because I admit I grow weary with clever theories about transgender people, as if our identity is part of an argument that anyone might win or lose. If you have a complex theory about gender that does nothing to reduce the suffering of a group of vulnerable, maligned souls, maybe what you need, above all, is a new theory. "

― Jennifer Finney Boylan , Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs

11 " This might seem sad to some of you, but it also strikes me as fundamentally human. Surely the hope of being transformed by love isn't some curious delusion unique to transgender people. If you've never hoped that love would turn you into someone better, then I don't know what to tell you. We probably have different ideas about love. "

― Jennifer Finney Boylan , Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs