Dogs are fantasies that don't disappoint.

All dogs can be guide dogs of a sort, leading us to places we didn't even know we needed or wanted to go.

Something is missing: that's as close as I can come to naming the sensation, an awareness of missed or thwarted connections, or of a great hollowness left where something lovely and solid used to be. ...There is something fundamentally insatiable about being human, as though we come into the world with a kind of built-in tension between the experience of being hungry, which is a condition of striving and yearning, and the experience of being fed, which may offer temporary satisfaction but always gives way to new strivings, new yearnings.

Dogs are fantasies that don't disappoint.

I don't think that the world would be a better place if everyone owned a dog, and I don't think that all relationships between dogs and their owners are good, healthy, or enriching.

Dogs possess a quality that's rare among humans -- the ability to make you feel valued just by being you -- and it was something of a miracle to me to be on the receiving end of all that acceptance. The dog didn't care what I looked like, or what I did for a living, or what a train wreck of a life I'd led before I got her, or what we did from day to day. She just wanted to be with me, and that awareness gave me a singular sensation of delight.

The key, I suppose, has less to do with insight than with willingness, the former being relatively useless without the latter.