Cleveland Amory Quotes & Sayings

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

I will omit but I will not distort. — Cleveland Amory

It has long been a theory of mine and I am known, if I do say so, for my long theories that authors, generally speaking, are rotten letter writers. — Cleveland Amory

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 mans man. — Cleveland Amory

A 'good' family, it seems, is one that used to be better. — Cleveland Amory

Support your right to arm bears. — Cleveland Amory

One of the ways in which cats show happiness is by sleeping. — Cleveland Amory

On resigning as collaborator on the memoirs of the former Wallis Warfield Simpson, new summaries, 6 October 1955. You can't make the Duchess of Windsor into Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. — Cleveland Amory

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

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

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

It used to be said that, socially speaking, Philadelphia asked who a person is, New York how much is he worth, and Boston what does he know. Nationally it has now become generally recognized that Boston Society has long cared even more than Philadelphia about the first point and has refined the asking of who a person is to the point of demanding to know who he was. Philadelphia asks about a man's parents; Boston wants to know about his grandparents. — Cleveland Amory

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

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 kind. — Cleveland Amory

The New England conscience does not stop you from doing what you shouldn't-it just stops you from enjoying it. — Cleveland Amory

You do not need to belong to the cat for a long time to realize the main thing that cats like to do is to wrap theirselves up in mystery, perhaps only except for a hobby of jumbling up everything that is in order. And if the cat can, and usually so, make a great mystery of where it was when you were searching for it even if a moment ago it was sitting by your side, do not have any doubts: its ancestors had a great pleasure to surround its origin by mystery. — Cleveland Amory

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

People ask me what makes a good funeral, and I tell them the most important thing is your man in the casket. If you have a man of substance in there, you have the makings of a first-class funeral. — Cleveland Amory

You cannot expect everything even from the friendliest cat. It is still a cat. — Cleveland Amory

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 people that set one animal against another haven't the guts to be bullies themselves. They're just secondhand cowards. — Cleveland Amory

Relations between the sexes are so complicated that the only way you can tell if members of the set are going together is if they are married. Then, almost certainly, they are not. — Cleveland Amory

Man has an infinite capacity to rationalize - especially when it comes to what he wants to eat. — Cleveland Amory

The National Park Service shot a mule in the face. He survived but had trouble swallowing and often food came out of his nose. — Cleveland Amory

Cats have enormous patience with the limitations of the human mind. They realize ... that we have an infuriating inability to understand, let alone follow, even the simplest and most explicit of directions. — Cleveland Amory

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

There are three terrible ages of childhood - 1 to 10, 10 to 20, and 20 to 30. — Cleveland Amory

Every damn President since I can remember has been so in love with foreign policy that they're just like a schoolboy with a new girl. — Cleveland Amory

Have you ever heard one civilized person whose opinion you respect, at any time, anywhere, in any civilized country anywhere, say the good new days? — Cleveland Amory

I consider the 3 most cruelly produced foods to be from lobsters, dropped alive into boiling water, veal from calves separated from their mothers and kept in crates, and pate de foie gras. — Cleveland Amory

In my day the schools taught two things, love of country and penmanship-now they don't teach either. — Cleveland Amory

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

The customer is always right! John Wanamaker must be turning in his grave. If you're a customer today, you're an intruder. — Cleveland Amory

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

The facts of life are very stubborn things. — Cleveland Amory

I detest professional anythings but particularly professional writers. Most of them today are just garbage collectors. — Cleveland Amory

I can't take a well-tanned person seriously. — Cleveland Amory