There Is No Dog Mortality Quotes

Until the poker game, he had been quite a feisty little soul, falling upon food each time with a glorious bleat of joy. He was a different Eck now that his life had been truncated, and who could blame him? Each meal he ate was one closer to his last. This was not an easy concept to swallow. Being mortal, he would, of course, have died eventually, but now he knew exactly when, and why, and (to an unpleasant extent) how. Now every tick of the clock brought him closer to oblivion. (20.41)

He [Bob] wasn't thinking of forever, of growing old with Lucy as his wife, sitting together on a bench in some windswept seaside town, her elderly swollen ankles in stout black shoes, distended knuckles resting on arthritic knees. Such visions meant nothing to him because he would always be exactly as he was now, despite the passage of time. His humans would change, grow old and die, disappear from earth and be forgotten, while he went on the same. (26.98)

They ate in silence. Eck had stopped begging at the table for scraps; even his insatiable hunger seemed to have waned. Hunger was just another pain he endured now as evidence that he was still alive—along with despair. If he starved, well, maybe it wasn't the worst way to die. ( 28.7)

Whenever Eck thought about the world after he was gone from it, he felt dizzy and full of terror. An eternity dead, while the rest of the world went about its business not thinking about him at all—how could that be? It seemed cruel to him, being put on earth just long enough to comprehend the full horror of extinction. (32.18)

Why did you bother creating me, he wanted to ask. Why bother giving me a brain and a realization of how miserable existence can be? Why did you invent creatures who die and, worse, who know they are going to die? What is the point of so unkind an act of creation? (32.23)

No world was as beautiful as this world he'd created, Bob thought, none so delicately poised between life and death. Mr. B might berate the short-lived race he'd made, berated it all the time, in fact. But he was proud of the experiment, proud of the weird evanescence all those short lives produced. OK, maybe it wasn't so nice for them, but at least they didn't drag along day after bloody day, always the same. Always alone. (34.22)

"But I'd never fall in love with one. Imagine the explaining you'd have to do. Think of the look on Lucy's face when you tell her who you are." (36.16)

"It's not right. Mortality is a terrible notion." Mr. B looks up at Bernard and lowers his voice, conspiratorially. "It's not like this everywhere, you know." (45.17)

"One hopes," he says, "after a long life, surrounded by loving family and the memory of good works . . ." "That it might not seem such a bad prospect?" Mr. B frowns. "Now, you see, I think that's untrue. The occasional person genuinely doesn't mind. But most do." He removes his spectacles and begins cleaning them on his handkerchief. "Something about eternal nothingness really rocks the boat." (45.21)

"Just look at them trundling along pretending that cataclysmic nothingness isn't waiting for them just round the bend. I watch them sometimes and I think that it doesn't really matter how much I worry about them. It's all over so fast. A bit of suffering—an entire lifetime, even. It's nothing, really." He pauses. "In the greater scheme of things, they may as well be fruit flies. So what if no one answers their prayers? Poof! Wait a minute or two, and your problem is gone. Dead. Buried. Forgotten." (45.28)