Quotes from Tom Cox

The way I viewed it, there were lots of very ugly things in London, so, on the occasions when something beautiful with a glossy coat came along and nudged its cold nose into your hand, it seemed churlish not to take a few moments to celebrate the mere fact of its existence.

people who hated cats were often control freaks who felt the world owed them a living.

Jokes about Crazy Cat Ladies seem harmless enough, but at their core is a disturbing echo of the hysterical witch superstitions of the Middle Age.

Cats have been all over the Internet for many years. This makes total sense, as they seem to spend half their lives trying to stand and sit on the keyboards of our laptops.

People have a habit, in the age of cameraphones and social networking, of being a bit too quick to turn all sorts of experiences into a 'memory'.

Each day the pair would meet at 2pm at the exact halfway point between the villages and stand a hundred yards apart, staring longingly at each other, yearning for the time when the pestilence would pass.

Floyd arrived in the kitchen and leapt onto Casper's back, then proceeded to start biting his neck. I'm an only child with a smallish family who had never done Christmas in a big way, but there was something about having two male cats tenderly humping in the corner of the room that made the occasion a little more festive.

Cats hate doors for the opportun ities doors deny them to do exactly what they please, but they love them in equal measure, due to the opportunities they present to make humans their snivelling slaves.

Quite simply, I did not want to spend much time away from my cats.

The more of them you have, the more you heighten your daily joy and entertainment, the more heartache you know you're going to get sooner or later, the more important it seems to make every second count.

Permission to drink freely from the well of life - and the upstairs loo

I love my cats, and I guess they think I'm okay. But I do sometimes get a very strong sense that they are purring at me, not with me. 5

More and more, he found landscape and the landmarks within it sucking him back into past conversations, ghost feelings, old ambiences. It went beyond that, though. Even without the power of an evocative image as a trigger, he was able to spend whole hours – sometimes longer – swimming in a vanished event or afternoon.

Maybe he misremembered much of what he lived through – timescales, sequences, the maths of it – but as he dipped into it via memory the feelings were refelt just as strongly, if not stronger.

The young will always to some extent view ageing as a matter of taste, as if the fact you do not appear to be young any more is a decision you've made, like selecting a certain type of carpet or paint for your house.

Shipley ... at the first sign of fireworks had walked outside, more or less held his paws out wide to the night air and defiantly announced, 'Bring it.

There's also something about ageing and the concomitant awareness of the fleeting nature of existence that tends to make you less worried about being ridiculous, and less judgemental about the quality of ridiculousness in others.

One of the good things about cats is that, unlike dogs, they don't come up to you in the street and try to have sex with your leg.

Some were drawn towards displays of physical showboating, when it came to cats, while others preferred subtle intellectual stimulation.

Early hopes when the pandemic first hit that nature was 'healing' had turned on their head and it appeared that in fact the virus was on the side of greed and destruction after all, annihilating all that was small and true and firming up the grip megalomaniacs and madmen had on the planet, in an attempt to push us more quickly towards the abyss.