Feral Creatures Quotes

“When you love someone with your soul, they never really leave you; they are hemmed into your heart.”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Feral Creatures

“Grief can slam into you like a well-waxed window. But it means the ones you love aren’t lost or forgotten. They’ve made a home in your heart, which is the most permanent place of all.”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Feral Creatures

“I had a black belt in running away from things and I wasn’t afraid to use it.”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Feral Creatures

“I was experiencing acute déjà poo—the feeling that I’d heard this crap before.”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Feral Creatures

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single crow in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a Cheeto®.”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Feral Creatures

“Chapter 28 Genghis Cat
Gracing Whatever Shithole This Is, Washington, USA You can all relax now, because I am here. What did you think? I’d run for safety at the whim of a fucking parrot with under-eye bags like pinched scrotums? Did you suspect I—a ninja with feather-wand fastness and laser-pointer focus—had the spine of a banana slug? Then you are a shit-toned oink with the senses of a sniveling salamander. Then you don’t know Genghis Cat. I look around and can see that we are surrounded by The Bird Beasts, those crepe-faced, hair ball–brained fuck goblins. I intensely dislike these lumpy whatthefuckareyous who straddle between the Mediocre Servant and animal worlds, trying to be one thing and really not being, like imitation crabmeat in a sushi log that is really just fucking whitefish and WE ALL KNOW IT. “Would you like a little of the crabmeat, Genghis?” my Mediocre Servants seemed to ask with their blobfish lips and stupid faces. “THAT’S FUCKING WHITEFISH, YOU REGURGITATED MOLES!” I’d yowl, and then I’d steal the sushi log and run off and growl very much so they couldn’t have it back, and later I would pee on their night pillows for good measure. I cannot imagine their lives before me. We mustn’t think of those bleak dark ages. But the Beasts are dangerous. I have watched them morph and chew into a house. I have seen them with spider legs and second stomachs and camouflage skins. I have seen them tear the legs off a horse and steal flight from those with feathers. Orange and I have lost family to their fuckish appetites. But they are still fakish faking beasts and I’m fucking Genghis Cat. They are imitation crab and Genghis is filet mignon Fancy Feast, bitch. Probably I should come clean here and tell you that I’m immortal. I always suspected it but can confirm it now that I have surpassed the allocated nine lives. I’m somewhere around life 884, give or take seventy-eight. Some mousers have called me a god, but I insist on modesty. I also don’t deny it. I might be a god. It seems to fit. It feels right. A stealthy, striped god with an exotically spotted tummy—it seems certain, doesn’t it to you? I’m 186 percent sure at this point. Orange insists we stay away from the Beasts all the time, but I only let Orange think he’s in charge. Orange is incredibly sensitive, despite being the size of a Winnebago. He hand-raised each of my kittens and has terrible nightmares, and I have to knead my paws on him to calm him down. Orange and I have a deal. I will kill anything that comes to harm Orange and Orange will continue to be the reason I purr.”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Feral Creatures

“Stories suture up our wounds, stitch us back together. They keep our loved ones alive.”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Feral Creatures

“Forgiveness is the ultimate act of strength.”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Feral Creatures

“Family doesn’t have to look like you; they can have feathers and scales and scutes. What matters is that you’re loved for who you are in your heart. We survive when we are seen.”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Feral Creatures

“What an extraordinary luxury to cast a shadow.”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Feral Creatures

“It’s not real. It’s just a story,” I said to her. I felt her great black-and-white head bob up and down. She filled me with waves of frothy hope as she said, “Dear Crow, it is all just story.”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Feral Creatures

“Maybe it’s animalness that will make the world right again: the wisdom of elephants, the enthusiasm of canines, the grace of snakes, the mildness of anteaters. Perhaps being human needs some diluting. —Carol Emshwiller”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Feral Creatures

“when you’re courageous, it is an invitation to others. The sky surrenders before those brave enough to leave the branch.”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Feral Creatures

“In case you are wondering what a human is, they were essentially bald apes that covered their genitals with cloth and experienced incessant outrage. Holy Funyuns, everything set them off—noises, the weather, the interminable celestial mystery of what happened to their socks, but mostly other humans.”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Feral Creatures

“Because when you’re courageous, it is an invitation to others. The sky surrenders before those brave enough to leave the branch.”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Feral Creatures

“I was sitting on Mount Vesuvius. And my ass was about to get Pompeii-ed.”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Feral Creatures

“A tear slipped down the cheek of my nestling, whose calloused skin could not protect her eggshell heart.”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Feral Creatures

“Oomingmak could not swim.”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Feral Creatures

“you are a shit-toned oink with the senses of a sniveling salamander.”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Feral Creatures

“In the midst of their pandemic panic, American MoFos hoarded unfathomable mountains of toilet paper. It has never been clear why they needed so much, and I imagined them salivating over their stockpiles like Smaug, if he’d had irritable bowel syndrome.”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Feral Creatures

“lemurs are polygynous (one male mates with several females in a breeding season). MoFos were also sometimes polygynous, but most tended to have just one wife, which they called monotony.”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Feral Creatures

“Me: What’s the difference between a cat and a complex sentence? Dee: “. . .” Me: A cat has claws at the end of its paws and a complex sentence has a pause at the end of its clause! Dee: “. . .”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Feral Creatures

“Mediocrity. I tell all my kittens as I pummel their tiny heads with my sandpaper tongue that smells like an eclectic medley of fish. They hear of scratching posts and leather furniture and catnip and Science Diet and the extraordinary pleasure of yarfing on a Persian rug and the magical kkkkkkrrrkkk of a can opening. Because we tell our blue-eyed kittens what to fear and what to love, what is a warm sun spot and what is sinister and menacing, like cucumbers. We must remember the Mediocre Servants when they were less rotten. Dee stroked my head and allowed me to chew on her arm. I claimed her by rubbing my face on her finger. This is a binding contract of ownership, throughout the universe, in perpetuity. I feel change coming in the way the wind whips against my whiskers. I see playful patterns in the rainbow light. I will Dee to live on, the last, the one with eyes that see everything like Genghis. And frankly, one day Dee will be all grown up and able to make cheese. Really, it’s all about the fucking cheese. Mediocre Servants have never been perfect, but they were once a damn sight better and I’m god enough to admit it—I miss them. So now I’m here and I’m not afraid of what’s next. Oh, and I brought some fucking backup with me.”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Feral Creatures

“Nestlings are not weapons. Dee was not born on this big beautiful blue as a “resource,” existing solely for our convenience.”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Feral Creatures

“Just because you have some sort of weird X-ray superpower doesn’t mean you should use it willy-nilly. Who knows what the long-term side effects of that shit are?”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Feral Creatures

“There had been so many MoFo ladies—the librarian, the lawyer, the gastromancer who conversed with dead people via tummy rumbles, the psychic we underestimated (she’d told Big Jim that the human population was about to be wiped out, which had really killed the vibe of mini golf), the bodybuilder, the one who wouldn’t let me steal her earrings, the pet oncologist, the one from Zimbabwe, the one with six children, the one with dead mice in her pockets (Detective Turd eked them out, and she had to come clean about being an Indian python mom). These strange species of MoFo blew in and out of our lives like empty Cheeto® bags.”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Feral Creatures