Quotes from Cleveland Amory

As anyone who has ever been around a cat for any length of time well knows, cats have enormous patience with the limitations of the human mind. They realize that, whether they like it or not, they are simply going to have to put up with what to them are excruciatingly slow mental processes, that we humans have embarrassingly low I.Q.'s, and that probably because of these defects, we have an infuriating inability to understand, let alone follow, even the simplest and most explicit of directions.

I will omit but I will not distort.

There are only two ways out for animals at pounds--being adopted or being killed. And cats have such a low rate of adoption that many pounds, even in some larger cities, don't bother to take them in at all. Not for nothing is it always the "dog pound" and never the "cat pound."

It suddenly dawned on me one day, when I was reading in the paper about a woman wrestler, that being a curmudgeon was the last thing in the world that a man can be that a woman cannot be. Women can be irritating -- after all, they are women -- but they cannot be curmudgeons.

There were three terrible ages of childhood -- zero to 10, 10 to 20, and 20 to 30.

I told the good Father that if he and I were going in the future to some wonderful Elysian Field and the animals were not going to go anywhere, that was all the more reason to give them a little better shake in the one life they did have.

To anyone who has ever been owned by a cat, it will come as no surprise that there are all sorts of things about your cat you will never, as long as you live, forget. Not the least of these is your first sight of him or her.

I've always had a sneaking fondness for Martin Van Buren. He wrote his autobiography, you know, and never once mentioned his wife. Now that's what I call a man's man.

The opera is like a husband with a foreign title: expensive to support, hard to understand, and therefore a supreme social challenge.

The New England conscience, I have often said, does not stop you from doing what you shouldn't -- it just stops you from enjoying it.

I have read a great deal about what animals dream, but none of it has ever really satisfied me. I believe they dream exactly the way we dream, and about everything in their lives--that they have good dreams and bad dreams in almost direct proportion, as we do, to whether their lives have been more good than bad. Unfortunately, because the majority of animals have it so much tougher than we do, I believe that the majority of dreams, except in the most fortunate petdom, are bad.

You can give of your talent, you can give of your possessions, or you can give of yourself. For God's sake, give something.

Support your right to arm bears.

What this world needs is a new kind of army — the army of the kind.

There are three terrible ages of childhood - 1 to 10, 10 to 20, and 20 to 30.

As anyone who has ever been around a cat for any length of time well knows cats have enormous patience with the limitations of the human kind.

For an animal person, an animal-less home is no home at all.

One of the ways in which cats show happiness is by sleeping.

The people that set one animal against another haven't the guts to be bullies themselves. They're just secondhand cowards.

Giving the cat a name, like marriage, is not an easy thing. Soon I experienced the selection of name for a baby, a dog, a book, a warship, a sports team, even the king, the pope or a hurricane is just child's play compared to the selection of the cat's name.

A person has an idea about foreign policy or doesn't know one's arse from one's elbow.

You cannot expect everything even from the friendliest cat. It is still a cat.

You do not need to belong to the cat for a long time to realize the main thing that cats like to do is to wrap theirselves up in mystery, perhaps only except for a hobby of jumbling up everything that is in order. And if the cat can, and usually so, make a great mystery of where it was when you were searching for it even if a moment ago it was sitting by your side, do not have any doubts: its ancestors had a great pleasure to surround its origin by mystery.

I have been extremely positive with almost all new people. And why, let me ask, shan't I be? When you think, you have a lot of to say for someone you know for a short time.