Most pet loss quote lists are padded and half the attributions are wrong. This one is short on purpose. Every line below has been traced to the work it came from, and anything we could not trace is on the page about misattributed pet loss quotes instead, named and corrected. The lines are grouped by the shape of the grief rather than by species, because that is how people actually arrive: not looking for "a dog quote", but for the one that matches the particular Tuesday they are having.
Short lines, for a card
Under a dozen words each. They leave room on the page for your own handwriting, which is the part that gets kept.
"My little old dog:
A heart-beat
At my feet." – Edith Wharton, the first of her "Lyrical Epigrams", Yale Review (1920). Public domain.
"The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven, not man's." – Mark Twain, in a letter to W. D. Howells dated 2 April 1899. We have this from the Belknap Press edition of the Mark Twain-Howells Letters (1960) rather than from the manuscript.
Byron's "Epitaph to a Dog" (1808) belongs in this group too. It is quoted below, and printed in full on our pet memorial poems page.
"Because of the dog's joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift." – Mary Oliver, Dog Songs (2013). Still in copyright; quoted here as a single attributed sentence.
The first days, when the ordinary keeps happening
The hardest thing about the first week is how normal everything else insists on being. You still make coffee. You still answer emails. The absence is loudest inside the ordinariness.
"But I can't forget, if I wanted to,
Four-Feet trotting behind." – Rudyard Kipling, "Four-Feet", first published in Limits and Renewals (1932). Public domain, and printed in full on our pet memorial poems page.
Kipling wrote it about a dog he had lost. The poem's "other round", a different route home taken to avoid the grief, is something most people find they are already doing before they have a name for it. You walk the long way past the park. You put the bowl in a cupboard. The shock does not announce itself. It just reroutes you.
"Dogs die so soon. I have my stories of that grief, no doubt many of you do also." – Mary Oliver, Dog Songs (2013).
That "no doubt many of you do also" is the useful part. The loss is particular to you, because it is about this animal and this specific hole in the day. The shape of it is not particular at all. Other people have done this.
The guilt: did I do enough, did I wait too long
Guilt is close to universal in pet loss, it is usually not rational, and it does not respond to being told so. It asks whether you chose the right moment, whether you noticed in time, whether you were there enough. These lines do not answer that. They establish that the questions are ordinary.
"Brothers and sisters, I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear." – Rudyard Kipling, "The Power of the Dog", from Actions and Reactions (1909). Public domain, and printed in full on our pet memorial poems page.
Kipling is writing about the grief you can see coming when you take an animal on. It reads differently afterwards. "Why do we always arrange for more?" is grief doubling back on itself, and the poem's answer, which it implies rather than says, is that the love made the arrangement worth it.
"The pain of grief is just as much a part of life as the joy of love; it is, perhaps, the price we pay for love, the cost of commitment." – Colin Murray Parkes, Bereavement: Studies of Grief in Adult Life (1972). Still in copyright.
Parkes was a psychiatrist who spent a career on bereavement, and he was not writing about animals. The cost of commitment. It does not mean you did anything wrong. It means you were committed.
"Our loves are not given, but only lent,
At compound interest of cent per cent." – Kipling, "The Power of the Dog" (1909).
Only lent. The loan was always going to come due. What you are feeling now is the interest on everything that was good.
When someone says it was only a pet
Some people will not understand, and most of them mean well. They say you can always get another one. They say at least it was just a dog. You do not have to argue with any of it, but it helps to know that people who thought carefully about animals saw the bond for what it was.
"When I play with my cat, who knows whether I do not make her more sport than she makes me?" – Michel de Montaigne, Essays, in John Florio's translation of 1603. Public domain.
Montaigne wrote that in the sixteenth century, which means people have been loving their cats and failing to understand them for a very long time. Your cat was a mystery to you. That is not a failure of attention; it is a fair description of a cat.
"It is impossible for a lover of cats to banish these alert, gentle, and discriminating friends, who give us just enough of their regard and complaisance to make us hunger for more." – Agnes Repplier, The Fireside Sphinx (1901). Public domain.
The long quiet ache
After the first sharp weeks it usually settles into something lower and more persistent. You can go most of a day without it and then it is simply there, undramatic, at the wrong moment.
"But the poor dog, in life the firmest friend,
The first to welcome, foremost to defend." – Lord Byron, "Epitaph to a Dog" (1808).
Byron wrote it for his Newfoundland, Boatswain, and had it carved on the dog's tomb at Newstead, where it still is. "Firmest friend" is not an exaggeration. Most people find that the greeting at the end of the day was uncomplicated in a way that nothing else in their life was, and that the uncomplicated thing is what they miss.
The slow turn, where it becomes something else
Not comfort and not resolution. The grief changing shape. It stops being the only thing you can think about them with.
"You will discover how much you care,
And will give your heart to a dog to tear." – Kipling, "The Power of the Dog" (1909). The stanza before this one is the part that hurts; it is on the poems page.
"You will discover how much you care." Not discovered. Discover. The grief is how you find out what the love was, which is why so many people say the size of it took them by surprise. They knew they loved the animal. They did not know the number.
The famous ones that are not here
Several of the most-shared pet loss quotes are missing from this page because they belong to somebody other than the person they are usually credited to, or to nobody at all. The Anatole France line, the Kundera line about paradise, the one about time spent with cats: all three are on the page about misattributed pet loss quotes, with what we could establish about each. A quote on a memorial should be true twice over, in what it says and in who said it.
When you want the words to be about them
Every line above says something true about loss. Not one of them can say that your dog stole socks out of the laundry basket, or that your cat sat on the third stair every evening waiting for the front door. That is the limit of a borrowed line, and it is worth knowing before you spend an hour looking for a better one. Our guide to writing a pet eulogy is about getting your own version down instead, and it has worked examples.
If you want longer verse rather than short lines, the pet memorial poems are the public-domain ones worth spending time with. If you are writing for somebody else, what to write in a pet sympathy card has the wording. If you are reading these for yourself rather than to write anything, our plain guide to the shapes grief takes may be more use than any quotation, and if it was the Rainbow Bridge you came for, we have written the true story of it.
And if the grief is heavier than you can carry on your own, you do not have to. The Blue Cross Pet Bereavement Support Service runs a free, confidential UK line on 0800 096 6606, 8.30am to 8.30pm every day, and Cats Protection runs Paws to Listen on 0800 024 9494, 9am to 5pm on weekdays. There is no loss too small to ring about. The pet loss support page has the rest of them.
Written by Craig Fearn, Small Goodbyes. Last updated .
