American author & animal rights activist (1917-1998)
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
For an animal person, an animal-less home is no home at all.
CLEVELAND AMORY
The Cat Who Came for Christmas
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
There were three terrible ages of childhood -- zero to 10, 10 to 20, and 20 to 30.
CLEVELAND AMORY
The Cat and the Curmudgeon
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
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
I will omit but I will not distort.
CLEVELAND AMORY
attributed, Dictionary of Quotations in Communications
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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?