Mongrel Quotes

“Colm was a good sleeper. But if there was one sound at night that should wake him, and any sensible man who loved his family, it was the barking of dogs. The noise was coming from the village. It was not just one or two dogs, but surely every mangy cur and mongrel that lived there. Something was abroad, and in this time of the dying of the year, when fell creatures roamed the countryside as hunger began to bite, it was not likely to be anything good.”

“Down you mongrel Death! Back into your kennel!”

“I see music as one language. If one musical form eats its own tail, it dies. So it needs to be a mongrel, it needs to be hybridised.”

“In the distance, mongrel dogs were howling out the coyote portion of their ancestry. All the sounds of the night seemed to pass through a hollow tunnel of indefinite length.”

“I am not a smart man, particularly, but one day, at long last, I stumbled from the dark woods of my own, and my family's, and my country's past, holding in my hands these truths: that love grows from the rich loam of forgiveness; that mongrels make good dogs; that the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things. This much, at least, I've figured out. I know this much is true.”

“As I look around on Sunday morning at the people populating the pews, I see the risk that God has assumed. For whatever reason, God now reveals himself in the world not through a pillar of smoke and fire, not even through the physical body of his Son in Galilee, but through the mongrel collection that comprises my local church and every other such gathering in God’s name. (p. 68, Church: Why Bother?)”

“Golden eagles don`t mate with bald eagles, deer don`t mate with antelope, gray wolves don`t mate with red wolves. Just look at domesticated animals, at mongrel dogs, and mixed breed horses, and you`ll know the Great Mystery didn`t intend them to be that way. We weakened the species and introduced disease by mixing what should be kept seperate. Among humans, intermarriage weakens the respect people have for themselves and for their traditions. It undermines clarity of spirit and mind.”

“I'll call any length of fiction a story, whether it be a novel or a shorter piece, and I'll call anything a story in which specific characters and events influence each other to form a meaningful narrative. I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. Then they find themselves writing a sketch with an essay woven through it, or an essay with a sketch woven through it, or an editorial with a character in it, or a case history with a moral, or some other mongrel thing. When they realize that they aren't writing stories, they decide that the remedy for this is to learn something that they refer to as "the technique of the short story" or "the technique of the novel." Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories it is something organic, something that grows out of the material, and this being the case, it is different for every story of any account that has ever been written.”

“Will Jehovah go down and be perfect? Not even one tiny sin? Think about that, Ammon. Is it possible? He will be spit upon and reviled, mocked, and hated by far lesser men, and yet he will never, not once, have an uncharitable thought, not a single pang of regret or ounce of self-pity. He will be hated and beaten, like some mongrel dog, while lesser men pass their judgment - and you believe he will never, not once, feel any anger or wish for revenge? Remember, it won't be good enough that he do the right thing. He can't even feel the wrong way, for that too is a sin. He must have perfect control over his body, his will, and his mind. He can't experience a moment of selfish anger or miss a single opportunity to serve. He can't entertain one self-serving notion, unkind thought, or harsh word! Not even one sin! What can do that, I ask?”