CLEVELAND AMORY QUOTES

American author & animal rights activist (1917-1998)

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.

CLEVELAND AMORY

The Cat Who Came for Christmas


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

CLEVELAND AMORY

The Cat Who Came for Christmas

Tags: animals, home


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

CLEVELAND AMORY

The Cat and the Curmudgeon

Tags: childhood


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.

CLEVELAND AMORY

obituary, The New York Times, Oct. 16, 1998


Unlike some people who have experienced the loss of an animal, I did not believe, even for a moment, that I would never get another.... I did know full well that there were just too many animals out there in need of homes for me to take what I have always regarded as the self-indulgent road of saying the heartbreak of the loss of an animal was too much ever to want to go through with it again. To me, such an admission brought up the far more powerful admission that all the wonderful times you had with your animal were not worth the unhappiness at the end.

CLEVELAND AMORY

The Cat Who Came for Christmas

Tags: death


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.

CLEVELAND AMORY

The Cat Who Came for Christmas

Tags: cats


I will omit but I will not distort.

CLEVELAND AMORY

attributed, Dictionary of Quotations in Communications


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.

CLEVELAND AMORY

interview, The Portland Oregonian, 1990

Tags: women


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."

CLEVELAND AMORY

The Cat Who Came for Christmas


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.

CLEVELAND AMORY

The Cat Who Came for Christmas


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

CLEVELAND AMORY

NBC Television, Apr. 6, 1961

Tags: opera


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.

CLEVELAND AMORY

The Cat Who Came for Christmas

Tags: dreams


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.

CLEVELAND AMORY

"Your Government", The Trouble with Nowadays


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.

CLEVELAND AMORY

The Cat and the Curmudgeon

Tags: conscience


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

CLEVELAND AMORY

Are You Happy?