Tom Cox > Quotes

“The way I viewed it, there were lots of very ugly things in London, so, on the occasions when something beautiful with a glossy coat came along and nudged its cold nose into your hand, it seemed churlish not to take a few moments to celebrate the mere fact of its existence.”
― Tom Cox, Under the Paw: Confessions of a Cat Man

“people who hated cats were often control freaks who felt the world owed them a living.”
― Tom Cox, The Good, The Bad and The Furry: The Brand New Adventures of the World's Most Melancholy Cat and Other Whiskery Friends

“Jokes about Crazy Cat Ladies seem harmless enough, but at their core is a disturbing echo of the hysterical witch superstitions of the Middle Age.”
― Tom Cox, The Good, the Bad and the Furry: Life with the World's Most Melancholy Cat and Other Whiskery Friends

“Cats have been all over the Internet for many years. This makes total sense, as they seem to spend half their lives trying to stand and sit on the keyboards of our laptops.”
― Tom Cox, The Good, the Bad and the Furry: Life with the World's Most Melancholy Cat and Other Whiskery Friends

“People have a habit, in the age of cameraphones and social networking, of being a bit too quick to turn all sorts of experiences into a ‘memory’.”
― Tom Cox, The Good, the Bad and the Furry: Life with the World's Most Melancholy Cat and Other Whiskery Friends

“The young will always to some extent view ageing as a matter of taste, as if the fact you do not appear to be young any more is a decision you’ve made, like selecting a certain type of carpet or paint for your house.”
― Tom Cox, Villager

“Cats hate doors for the opportun ities doors deny them to do exactly what they please, but they love them in equal measure, due to the opportunities they present to make humans their snivelling slaves.”
― Tom Cox, The Good, The Bad and The Furry: The Brand New Adventures of the World's Most Melancholy Cat and Other Whiskery Friends

“Each day the pair would meet at 2pm at the exact halfway point between the villages and stand a hundred yards apart, staring longingly at each other, yearning for the time when the pestilence would pass.”
― Tom Cox, Help the Witch

“Permission to drink freely from the well of life - and the upstairs loo”
― Tom Cox, Under the Paw: Confessions of a Cat Man

“The more of them you have, the more you heighten your daily joy and entertainment, the more heartache you know you’re going to get sooner or later, the more important it seems to make every second count.”
― Tom Cox, Under the Paw: Confessions of a Cat Man

“I love my cats, and I guess they think I’m okay. But I do sometimes get a very strong sense that they are purring at me, not with me. 5”
― Tom Cox, Talk to the Tail

“Quite simply, I did not want to spend much time away from my cats.”
― Tom Cox, Under the Paw: Confessions of a Cat Man

“Floyd arrived in the kitchen and leapt onto Casper’s back, then proceeded to start biting his neck. I’m an only child with a smallish family who had never done Christmas in a big way, but there was something about having two male cats tenderly humping in the corner of the room that made the occasion a little more festive.”
― Tom Cox, The Good, the Bad and the Furry: Life with the World's Most Melancholy Cat and Other Whiskery Friends

“There’s also something about ageing and the concomitant awareness of the fleeting nature of existence that tends to make you less worried about being ridiculous, and less judgemental about the quality of ridiculousness in others.”
― Tom Cox, The Good, the Bad and the Furry: Life with the World's Most Melancholy Cat and Other Whiskery Friends

“The sun was peeking over a row of beeches like a pastoral equivalent of the classic graffiti of Kilroy and his wall, and the owls of the valley had just handed the avian noise baton over to the Dawn Chorus. This morning the band, which was rapidly becoming one of my all-time favourite British ones, right up there with Led Zeppelin, Pentangle and the Stones, was working on a fuller sound: lots of new session players were chipping in and trying out new ideas, including a pheasant, the ensemble’s answer to a notoriously unreliable bagpipe player who stumbles in, still drunk from the night before, blows a couple of off-kilter notes, then leaves. Still in my pyjamas,”
― Tom Cox, 21st-Century Yokel

“In another incident flavoured with arguably no less paranormal excitement two years prior to that, I had happened upon an unmanned table of home-made jam in some woodland on the other side of the road.”
― Tom Cox, 21st-Century Yokel

“What it instead often leads to is a brand of knowledge that’s thousands of miles wide and half a centimetre deep: a pond-skating mentality of misleading screenshots and thinly gleaned opinions and out-of-context sound bites and people reading hastily between the lines while forgetting the vital thing you also need to do when practising that skill is to read the lines themselves. The idea of getting to know an area of limited size extremely well works as an antidote to this, and even in a very small area there is always more to know. You can reduce your space right down – to one hedgerow or wall or flooded out-of-use tin mine – and there will never be enough time to know it all.”
― Tom Cox, 21st-Century Yokel

“Social fissures spread out in all sorts of unanticipated ways. Making snap judgements online about the lives and personalities of people you’d never met had already been a fashionable form of stupidity for quite some time, but now it became an international sport. Fear leaked while people weren’t looking, crept through tiny gaps under doors and puddled. ‘It’s scary out there,’ people said. ‘Stay safe.’ But much of the time it felt like the problem wasn’t out there at all, it was in there, in the screens that everybody carried with them everywhere they went and nobody could stop looking at.”
― Tom Cox, Villager

“Some were drawn towards displays of physical showboating, when it came to cats, while others preferred subtle intellectual stimulation.”
― Tom Cox, The Good, the Bad and the Furry: Life with the World's Most Melancholy Cat and Other Whiskery Friends

“The Internet just conned me into wishing it, because the Internet knows that humans like to share stuff, and that sharing stuff often comes from a kind place and carries the promise of bringing us all closer, so it gets us all addicted to the process, but leaves us ultimately emptier as a result, hovering in a state of non-presentness, getting nostalgic for stuff that happened barely any time ago that we didn’t even take the time to properly absorb when it did happen, skimming across everything, not quite fully experiencing any of it. But the Internet is also teeming with good intentions and seductive promises, and that is the problem.”
― Tom Cox, 21st-Century Yokel

“One of the good things about cats is that, unlike dogs, they don’t come up to you in the street and try to have sex with your leg.”
― Tom Cox, The Good, the Bad and the Furry: Life with the World's Most Melancholy Cat and Other Whiskery Friends

“Maybe he misremembered much of what he lived through – timescales, sequences, the maths of it – but as he dipped into it via memory the feelings were refelt just as strongly, if not stronger.”
― Tom Cox, Villager

“At the club, nicknames stuck like dog hair to merino wool. A wiry, anxious weekend player called Phil who’d once missed a crucial putt when he was distracted by the call of a skein of Canada geese overhead was thereafter known to all as ‘Quack’. Carl Marchwell, who was infamous for telling all of his playing companions in great detail about his week and lacked the skill of self-editing, hadn’t been called ‘Carl’ by anybody at the club for years; he was always ‘Jackanory’. Ian Welcombe, who liked to bet big money on foursome matches but had never, to anybody’s knowledge, actually won, was ‘The Bank’. Jill, Ian’s wife – one of the few female members of the club who actually seemed to enjoy the game – was not ‘Jill’ but ‘Mrs Bank’. Recently I’d overheard people talking about somebody called ‘Jam Jar’ but I was yet to find out who that was.”
― Tom Cox, Villager

“... Shipley ... at the first sign of fireworks had walked outside, more or less held his paws out wide to the night air and defiantly announced, 'Bring it.”
― Tom Cox, Close Encounters of the Furred Kind

“More and more, he found landscape and the landmarks within it sucking him back into past conversations, ghost feelings, old ambiences. It went beyond that, though. Even without the power of an evocative image as a trigger, he was able to spend whole hours – sometimes longer – swimming in a vanished event or afternoon.”
― Tom Cox, Villager

“Early hopes when the pandemic first hit that nature was ‘healing’ had turned on their head and it appeared that in fact the virus was on the side of greed and destruction after all, annihilating all that was small and true and firming up the grip megalomaniacs and madmen had on the planet, in an attempt to push us more quickly towards the abyss.”
― Tom Cox, Villager