If we eliminated the dog from our lives, nothing much would happen to our ecology. Independent of man, the dog is a vandal. With m...an, he does a little sheep-herding, a little watch-dogging. He helps law enforcement officers control the troublesome ghetto-dwellers and protest marchers. He sniffs out "hash" and "grass." He goes out on weekends and helps man murder other forms of life for pleasure. But mostly he is just an adjunct to man's ego.... The cat owes man nothing. Some experts estimate that there is one homeless cat managing on its own for every one with a home, which makes a total cat population in the U.S. of more than fifty million. That means the largest nonhuman animal population in the nation, short of rodents, whose number is beyond estimate. Eliminate cats from our ecology and, in a matter of weeks, we would be overrun by rodents.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Cats are the ultimate narcissists. You can tell this because of all the time they spend on personal grooming. Dogs aren't like thi...s. A dog's idea of personal grooming is to roll in a dead fish. Dogs spend their time thinking about doing good deeds for their masters, or sleeping.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even... more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanity the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are becoming like cats, slyly parasitic, enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and snug in "the social" our historic passio...ns have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial cosiness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Animals are ever so psychic. There are some people who just can't come in here.... The cats particularly. They seem to know. You c...an fool everybody, but landy M deary-me, you can't fool a cat. They seem to know who's not right, if you know what I mean.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The cats will be glad; the fathers feel justified; the mothers relieved.... The sons and husbands will no longer need to pay the bills. Childhoods will be put away, the obscene nightmare abated.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Any owner of cats will know of what I speak. Cats come at dawn to sit on your bed. They may not nip your nose or inhale your breat...h or make a sound. They simply sit there and stare at you until you open one eyelid and spy them there about to drop dead for need of feeding. So it is with ideas. They come silently in the hour of trying to wake up and remember my name. The notions and fancies sit on the edge of my wits, whisper in my ears and then, if I don't rouse, give more than cats give: a good knock in the head, which gets me out and down to my typewriter before the ideas flee or die or both. In any event, I make the ideas come to me. I do not go to them. I provoke their patience by pretending disregard. This infuriates the latent creature until it is almost raving to be born and once born, nourished.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Rats! They fought the dogs and killed the cats,... And bit the babies in the cradles, And ate the cheeses out of the vats, And licked the soup from the cooks' own ladles, Split open the kegs of salted sprats, Made nests inside men's Sunday hats, And even spoiled the women's chats By drowning their speaking With shrieking and squeaking In fifty different sharps and flats.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Cats of all kinds weave in and out of the text; Burroughs has clearly taken to them in a big way in his old age and seems torn bet...ween a fear they will betray him into sentimentality and a resigned acceptance that a man can't be ironic all the time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »