Felines Quotes

“What a luxury a cat is, the moments of shocking and startling pleasure in a day, the feel of the beast, the soft sleekness under your palm, the warmth when you wake on a cold night, the grace and charm even in a quite ordinary workaday puss. Cat walks across your room, and in that lonely stalk you see leopard or even panther, or it turns its head to acknowledge you and the yellow blaze of those eyes tells you what an exotic visitor you have here, in this household friend, the cat who purrs as you stroke, or rub his chin, or scratch his head.”
― Doris Lessing, The Old Age of El Magnifico

“My cat brought me a toy. I thanked her and threw it. She sat there gave me a look that made me realize people and dogs are the crazy ones.”
― Dan Harmon

“The white cat Sal-al was lying on the straw matting in the empty conservatory. She looked at us with a wicked, conceited expression as if all her appetites had just been satisfied. She was beautiful. Vesta and I both said, "I wish I were a cat!" Before we got to the last word we smiled at each other in annoyance, not liking the idea that most human beings think very much alike.”
― Denton Welch, Maiden Voyage

“And the Lady's mate. Despite having only two legs and small fangs, there was much that was feline in that one, and he approved.”
― Anne Bishop, Queen of the Darkness

“One cat just leads to another”
― Ernest Hemingway

“A trademark of something that works well, the cat body has hardly changed since its inception. Like with today's cats, their digestive systems could handle only flesh. The lesson of the cat is that if you are to become a full-fledged carnivore, you have to commit everything to it. A house cat fed vegetarian food will shrivel and die.”
― Craig Childs, The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild

“When he heard people with no knowledge of a cat's character saying that cats were not as loving as dogs, that they were cold and selfish, he always thought to himself how impossible it was to understand the charm and lovableness of a cat if one had not, like him, spent many years living alone with one. The reason was that all cats are to some extent shy creatures: they won't show affection or seek it from their owners in front of a third person but tend rather to be oddly standoffish. Lily too would ignore Shozo or run off when he called her, if his mother were present. But when the two of them were alone, she would climb up on his lap without being called and devote the most flattering attention to him.”
― Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, A Cat, a Man, and Two Women: Stories

“Kittens, kittens, showers of kittens, visitations of kittens. So many, you see them as Kitten, like leaves growing on a bare branch, staying heavy and green, then falling, exactly the same every year. People coming to visit say: What happened to that lovely kitten? What lovely kitten? They are all lovely kittens.”
― Doris Lessing, On Cats

“Only felines were better than humans at sarcasm.”
― Gavin G. Smith, The Age of Scorpio

“...there is the fable, Chinese I think, literary I am sure: of a period on earth when the dominant creatures were cats: who after ages of trying to cope with the anguishes of mortality---famine, plague, war, injustice, folly, greed---in a word, civilized government---convened a congress of the wisest cat philosophers to see if anything could be done: who after long deliberation agreed that the dilemma, the problems themselves were insoluble and the only practical solution was to give it up, relinquish, abdicate, by selecting from among the lesser creatures a species, race optimistic enough to believe that the mortal predicament could be solved and ignorant enough never to learn better. Which is why the cat lives with you, is completely dependent on you for food and shelter but lifts no paw for you and loves you not; in a word, why your cat looks at you the way it does.”
― William Faulkner, The Reivers

“A cat needs a place as much as it needs a person to make its own.”
― Doris Lessing, On Cats

“Here tail moved, in another dimension, as if its tip was catching messages her other organs could not. She sat poised, air-light, looking, hearing, feeling, smelling, breathing, with all of her, fur, whiskers, ears---everything, in delicate vibration.”
― Doris Lessing, On Cats

“Kittens are lively as the days of spring. They make everybody happy.”
― Bhuwan Thapaliya

“My mother was a mother of mothers,
modern before she was ancestral.
She was a woman who morphed into feline, back
to her human self before I woke each morning.”
― Tina Chang

“The Feline Chill by Stewart Stafford

The feline parries morning's biting kiss
That turbulently gooses the hedgerows
The cat barometer turns back inside
To relax and preen by the hearth.

Gusts howl at the blasé abandonment
Our whiskered friend deaf to protests
Domestic tiger curled in busy routine
Single-minded creature of no reflection.

The storm's symphony rises and fades
To twitching limbs of galloping kitty dreams
Elements vanquished in slumbering tricks
Puss goes and stands by the door once more.

© Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford