Quotes from Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog

“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. He taught me to appreciate the simple things-a walk in the woods, a fresh snowfall, a nap in a shaft of winter sunlight. And as he grew old and achy, he taught me about optimism in the face of adversity. Mostly, he taught me about friendship and selflessness and, above all else, unwavering loyalty.”
― John Grogan, quote from Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog

“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.
It is amazing how much love and laughter they bring into our lives and even how much closer we become with each other because of them.”
― John Grogan, quote from Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog

“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”
― John Grogan, quote from Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog

“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.”
― John Grogan, quote from Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog

“Dogs are great. Bad dogs, if you can really call them that, are perhaps the greatest of them all.”
― John Grogan, quote from Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog

“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.”
― John Grogan, quote from Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog

“A dog has no use for fancy cars, big homes, or designer clothes. A water logged stick will do just fine. A dog doesn't care if you're rich or poor, clever or dull, smart or dumb. Give him your heart and he'll give you his. How many people can you say that about? How many people can make you feel rare and pure and special? How many people can make you feel extraordinary?”
― John Grogan, quote from Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog

“Then I dropped my forehead against his and sat there for a long time, as if I could telegraph a message through our two skulls, from my brain to his. I wanted to make him understand some things.

You know all that stuff we’ve always said about you?” I whispered. “What a total pain you are? Don’t believe it. Don’t believe it for a minute, Marley.” He needed to know that, and something more, too. There was something I had never told him, that no one ever had. I wanted him to hear it before he went.

Marley,” I said. “You are a great dog.”
― John Grogan, quote from Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog

“There's no such thing as a bad dog, just a bad owner.”
― John Grogan, quote from Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog

“In a dog's life, some plaster would fall, some cushions would open, some rugs would shred. Like any relationship, this one had its costs. They were costs we came to accept and balance against the joy and amusement and protection and companionship he gave us.”
― John Grogan, quote from Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog

“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.”
― John Grogan, quote from Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog

“If you still think you're a young pup then you are, no matter what the calendar says”
― John Grogan, quote from Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog

“I had never thought of Marley as any kind of model, but sitting there sipping my beer, I was aware that maybe he held the secret for a good life. Never slow down, never look back, live each day w/ adolescent verve and spunk and curiosity and playfulness.”
― John Grogan, quote from Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog

“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.”
― John Grogan, quote from Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog

“In a world of bosses, you are your own master”
― John Grogan, quote from Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog

“Only then did I see. Something was amiss with Patrick's snap-on one piece, or "onesie" as we manly dads like to call it. His chubby thighs, I now realized, were squeezed into the armholes, which were so tight they must have been cutting off his circulation. The collared neck hung between his legs like an udder. Up top, Patrick's head stuck out through the unsnapped crotch, and his arms were lost somewhere in the billowing pant legs. It was quite a look.”
― John Grogan, quote from Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog

“Never slow down, never look back, live each day with adolescent verve and spunk and curiosity and playfulness. If you think you’re still a young pup, then maybe you are, no matter what the calendar says.”
― John Grogan, quote from Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog

“We now had three girls and one testosterone-pumped guy bird that spent every walking minute doing of of three things: pursuing sex, having sex or crowing boastfully about the sex he had just scored. Jenny observed that roosters are what men would be if left to their own devices, with no social conventions to rein in their baser instincts, and I couldn't disagree. I had to admit, I kind of admired the lucky bastard.”
― John Grogan, quote from Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog

“Standing out there in th dark, I felt many different things. One of them was pride in my fellow Americans, ordinary people who rose to the moment, knowing it was their last. One was humility, for I was alive and untouched by the horrors of that day, free to continue my happy life as a husband and father and writer. In the lonely blackness, I could almost taste the finiteness of life and thus it's preciousness. We take it for granted, but it is fragile, precarious, uncertain able to cease at any instant without notice. I was reminded of what should be obvious but too often is not, that each today, each hour and minute, is worth cherishing.”
― John Grogan, quote from Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog

“A dog doesn't care if you are rich or poor, educated of illiterate, clever or dull. Give him your heart and he will give you his. It was really quite simple, and yet we humans, so much wiser and more sophisticated, have always had trouble figuring out what really counts and what does not.”
― John Grogan, quote from Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog

“Na solidão da noite, quase conseguia sentir a finitude da vida e como ela era preciosa. Nós damo-la como garantida, mas ela é frágil, precária, incerta, susceptível de acabar a qualquer momento sem aviso. Lembrei-me daquilo que devia ser evidência mas nem sempre é: que vale a pena saborear cada dia, cada hora e cada minuto das nossas vidas.”
― John Grogan, quote from Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog

“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.”
― John Grogan, quote from Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog

“In a dog’s life, some plaster would fall, some cushions would open, some rugs would shred. Like any relationship, this one had its costs. They were costs we came to accept and balance against the joy and amusement and protection and companionship he gave us. We could have bought a small yacht with what we spent on our dog and all the things he destroyed. Then again, how many yachts wait by the door all day for your return? How many live for the moment they can climb in your lap or ride down the hill with you on a toboggan, licking your face?”
― John Grogan, quote from Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog

“Yet by some stroke of almost providential good fortune, he became wanted.”
― John Grogan, quote from Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog

“I nostri animali hanno vite molto brevi da trascorrere con noi, e ne trascorrono la maggior parte ad aspettare che torniamo a casa ogni giorno.”
― John Grogan, quote from Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog

“Whatever false sense of security the contraption had once offered us was gone. Each time we left, even for a half hour, we wondered whether this would be the time that our manic inmate would bust out and go on another couch-shredding, wall-gouging, door-eating rampage. So much for peace of mind.”
― John Grogan, quote from Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog

“That’s when it happened. So fast, in fact, that we didn’t even realize it had happened. All we knew was that one instant we were sitting at a lovely outdoor table toasting the beautiful day, and the next our table was on the move, crashing its way through the sea of other tables, banging into innocent bystanders, and making a horrible, ear-piercing, industrial-grade shriek as it scraped over the concrete pavers.”
― John Grogan, quote from Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog

About the author

Popular quotes

“He believed in mission. But . . . he did not believe in it as an intellectual imperative, or even as a professional standard. Mission . . . was an abstract notion that took meaning in concrete situations.”
― Tim O'Brien, quote from Going After Cacciato

“… people didn't seem to be able to remember what it was like with the elves around. Life was certainly more interesting then, but usually because it was shorter. And it was more colorful, if you liked the color of blood.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Lords and Ladies

“We're connected, as women. It's like a spiderweb. If one part of that web vibrates, if there's trouble, we all know it, but most of the time we're just too scared, or selfish, or insecure to help. But if we don't help each other, who will?”
― Sarah Addison Allen, quote from The Peach Keeper

“Stop all this talk about monsters, Michele. Monsters don’t exist. It’s men you should be afraid of, not monsters.”
― Niccolò Ammaniti, quote from I'm Not Scared

“Was I insane? Maybe. But then, there were many different kinds of insanity. Aunt Rose had always taken for granted that the whole world was in a state of constantly fluctuating madness, and that a neurosis was not an illness, but a fact of life, like pimples. Some have more, some have less, but only truly abnormal people have none at all. This commonsense philosophy had consoled me many times before, and it did now, too.”
― Anne Fortier, quote from Juliet

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.