We aren’t shopping yet, but my wife and I are definitely thinking about getting another dog. We really miss our yellow lab, Floyd. It’s been two and a half years since his passing. The grief and love will never go away, but an emptiness can be filled. After all, a dog is a true companion.

As Emily Dickinson affectionately noted: “Dogs are better than human beings, because they know but do not tell.” 

I keep this quote right next to another one of Dickinson’s alarmingly contemporary observations: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”

It’s hard to imagine such a snappy hip outburst coming from the mouth of a recluse in Amherst 145 years ago. But there you have it. How do I know these quotes? Easy. They’re right on the notes app on my smartphone. Some people collect stamps or coins or timepieces or Wedgwood or first editions or second opinions. I collect quotes. There’s no money in it, but it gives me lots of pleasure. Quotes from others, especially famous others, become talking points for all my inner voices.

It’s the journalist in me that hoards quotes for future use in columns, at impasses at parties or in email signatures. And naturally I even find myself collecting quotes from other journalists. Over the past couple of years, I have found that I’ve savored and saved statements on everything from pooches to poetry to politics to lines that make me laugh.

“Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.” So wrote New York Sun columnist Don Marquis. Just about 100 years ago he came up with the light verse antics of Archy and Mehitabel, the cockroach and cat who respectively had past lives as a poet and Cleopatra. His seemed a fitting comment since I just published a book of poetry.

While waiting for that echo, I smile thinking of Carl Sandburg’s lyrical description: “Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.” My favorite explanation of this genre comes from T. S. Eliot: “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”  Let that settle in.

There’s a treasure trove in the sparks and snarks of Oscar Wilde. Some I’ve used in my email signatures, such as: “I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.” This rings true for any writer.

Another great call of our Wilde: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”  Now that’s poetry. Occasionally I find such a line that teases the urge for verse. For another example, nearly 400 years ago, French mathematician Blaise Pascal noted: “Most of our problems proceed from our inability to sit quietly in a small room.” Let that one sink in. Seems timeless.

As for prescience, there are plenty of political comments from yesteryear that can send tingles down the spine of any voter today.

In 1941 in the last year of his life, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote: “We may have democracy or we may have wealth concentrated in a few hands but we can’t have both.”

Such a thought brings to mind an Edmund Burke quote from 250 years ago: “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” And then there’s the flip side from George Orwell in the time of Brandeis: “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

If, however, you check online quote investigators, you will see that just about anybody might have said those last two comments, but not necessarily Burke and Orwell. They just sound like Burke and Orwell. What the author of 1984 and Animal Farm did in fact offer were these wise words: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

On a lighter political note, lately I’m naggingly reminded of author Kurt Vonnegut’s wisecrack: “True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.”

A true laugh line. But I have to say that in going over my yellow-note quotes, the one that says it all in the shortest space comes from Ring Lardner, humorist, sports writer, short story master and a Don Marquis contemporary. Nearly 100 years ago he wrote: “Shut up, he explained.”

Sounds like a good maxim for dog training.

Arnie Reisman and his wife, Paula Lyons, regularly appear on the weekly NPR comedy quiz show, Says You! He also writes for the Huffington Post.

As If Souls Are Costumes

    Nobody was ever just a nobody in a previous life.
    Everybody was a king, a queen, a conqueror,
           a concubine.
    Never a baker, a barber, a butterfly
    never a livery driver, a Red Cros worker,
           a Bottlenose dolphin.

    As if souls are costumes

    as in you used to be somebody
    but now you’re just passing through
    and since your inner salesman once
    not only cut the Gordian knot but also tied it
    attention must be paid.

    As if spirits hang in the backs of closets

    driven by the fear of insignificance
    you walk around a past you never had
    hide inside a museum made of air
    miss the meaning of significance
    the meaning of life in the moment.

    You don’t have to be St. Francis
    to talk to the sparrows.
    You don’t have to be Joan of Arc
    to hear heavenly orchestras.
    You don’t have to be Shakespeare
    to know the world can be rotten
    full of accidental judgements, casual slaughters.

    This is the time, time on earth.
    Smell the sun, reap the wind, investigate love
    pet a dog, search the wonderment in his eyes.
    You may see me looking right back at you.

— Arnie Reisman