Never Have Your Dog Stuffed
(New York, Random House, 2005)
by Alan Alda
Gradually, I came to learn that not speaking about things is how we operated.
Page 4.
Like the earliest humans, I put together my observations and came up with a picture of how things worked that was as ingenious as it was cockeyed.
Page 5.
I heard the sound of their clothing sliding on and off their bodies. All of this was far more interesting for a three-year-old than you might imagine.
Page 8.
If you could capture attention, that was an accomplishment. It was the accomplishment.
Page 10.
I’m struck by how I grew up among people who didn’t seem to know what children were, because they were children themselves. And I couldn’t tell the difference between adults and children, either. We were all together in a happy, innocent, erotic Eden.
Page 11.
For ten cents, a gas station down the block would sell us enough kerosene to blow ourselves up. It’s not clear why we didn’t.
Page 16.
Stuffing your dog is more than what happens when you take a dead body and turn it into a souvenir. It’s also what happens when you hold on to any living moment longer than it wants you to.
Memory can be a kind of mental taxidermy, trying to hold on to the present after it’s become the past. I didn’t know this then. Change was coming.
Page 24.
Don’t assume you think like a snake unless you are one.
Page 26.
A rumpus room was a forties invention: a room where you could raise a rumpus.
Page30.
The carpet was my best school, and curiosity was my favorite teacher.
Page 33.
Other people’s obsessions are boring.
Page 37.
My curiosity was making me ask dangerous questions, even as I was working on belonging.
Page 47.
We had that feeling of immense power that comes from writing words on paper that can make other people feel something.
Page 51.
I wanted to possess books and, if I could, to always have one in my hand.
Page 55.
I had a special fondness for ideas that went against the current. I was surprised to find out that the church still used an Index of Prohibited Books, so whenever I could find out what current books were on it, the Index became my unofficial reading list.
Page 55.
I had felt, mistakenly, that they would be pleased by my progress, but my new interests had separated me from them as abruptly as if I had jumped out of an airplane.
Page 56.
Just having books was the point, and lugging a valise full of them to the train station and hoisting it up onto the metal rack made me feel like a scholar.
Page 62.
Nothing matches your first potage.
Page 64.
I never quite got used to the idea that the army isn’t happy just knowing what your plans are. They like to make plans for you.
Page 80.
Once you set a thought in motion, it went on its own.
Page 85.
Somehow, I thought that all you had to do was take acting seriously to be good at it.
Page 92.
I was drunk with my own precocity.
Page 92.
It was a revelation to learn, as only a few young people do, that if you looked carefully, you could find the most wonderful ways to waste time.
Page 95.
I didn’t like gambling, but I liked systems. I liked looking for patterns. A system that had predictable results would not, I felt, be the same as gambling. You could lose at g ambling.
Page 103.
I wasn’t addicted to gambling. I didn’t like gambling. What I was obsessed with was patterns, systems.
Page 107.
If you had the courage not to know the answer beforehand, it would come to you. If you could trust yourself, not knowing was an exciting place to be.
But to trust yourself, you had to know yourself.
Page 116.
Our children learned about life from watching us and we learned about it from watching them.
Page 123.
I had begun as an eccentric comedian. I had felt uncomfortable competing with my father, who was one of the most attractive leading men of his generation. So I had carve out an area for myself I could excel in without competing and surely losing to him.
Page 126.
I realized that I was never going to have things the way I wanted them, no matter how vivid they seemed in my imagination. In a way, life itself was an improvisation in which I was going to have to deal with what came to me and not think about what should have come.
Page 129.
I tried to throw myself into everything I did, but my aim wasn’t always that good. There was too much I needed to learn.
Page 132.
My impulse to rescue her was one part actual rescue and one part a wish for gratitude. I had to settle, grudgingly, for simply doing the right thing.
Page 134.
Compassion is scary. If you open up too much to people, they have power over you and make you do things for them.
Page 151.
First days are almost always difficult.
Page 151.
Trust is where the gold is.
Page 154.
Conveying a lot by doing little is much harder. We always do more than we need to.
Page 159.
The difference between listening and pretending to listen, I discovered, is enormous. One is fluid, the other is rigid. Ne is alive, the other is stuffed.
Pages 160.
Real listening is a willingness to let the other person change you. When I’m willing to let them change me, something happens between us that’s more interesting than a pair of dueling monologues. Like so much of what I learned in the theater, this turned out to be how life works, too.
Page 161.
Some people are not in their right minds when they meet famous people.
Page 167.
Each of us has someone we’ve seen on a screen in a darkened room - a screen we scan, possibly, with the same part of our brain we use for dreaming - and when that person magically steps out of our dreams and into reality, we can become disoriented.
Pages 167-168.
I had always wondered why people wanted to be rich and famous. If you could be rich and anonymous, that would be fun. To be famous and not rich, the way we were, was the least fun. It takes time and effort to be famous, and if they offer you fame without the money, don’t take it. It’s a scam.
Page 169.
If I was going to deal with the changes in my life, I would have to rearrange things inside my head.
Page 170.
Having your time capsule opened while you’re still alive is not a good idea.
Page 182.
The best things come last.
Page 195.
I’ve always thought you could learn to get around in any language if you concentrated on about thirty well-chosen verbs, a couple of dozen nouns, a few pleasantries, and some basic sense of word order.
Page 209.
I don’t just get flooded with ideas, I get flooded with systems.
Page 209.
The Amazon is a giant ileum. It carries nutrients and waste downriver through loops and folds, and pulled by gravity, it experiences a kind of curvature of space.
Page 215.
You can tell a lot about people by the way they treat the help.
Page 220.
Maybe God is the ultimate bully who teases us with life, then pulls it out of reach.
Page 223.