The New Yorker > Quotes

“[Raymond Chandler] wrote as if pain hurt and life mattered.”
― New Yorker

“On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog...”
― The New Yorker

“Dillinger is an epicure, serenely removed from such soft and bourgeois considerations as loyalty and disloyalty, and her only anxiety in life is to better herself aesthetically.”
― The New Yorker, The Big New Yorker Book of Cats

“But that's what being an artist is - feeling crummy before everyone else feels crummy.”
― The New Yorker

“You know how it is—you start with one tiger, then you get another and another, then a few are born and a few die, and you start to lose track of details like exactly how many tigers you actually have.”
― The New Yorker, The Big New Yorker Book of Cats

“Even though the wreckage had been described to her, and though she was still in pain, the sight horrified and amazed her, and there was something she noticed about it that particularly gave her the creeps. Over everything—up through the wreckage of the city, in gutters, along the riverbanks, tangled among tiles and tin roofing, climbing on charred tree trunks—was a blanket of fresh, vivid, lush, optimistic green; the verdancy rose even from the foundations of ruined houses. Weeds already hid the ashes, and wild flowers were in bloom among the city’s bones. The bomb had not only left the underground organs of plants intact; it had stimulated them. Everywhere were bluets and Spanish bayonets, goose-foot, morning glories and day lilies, the hairy-fruited bean, purslane and clotbur and sesame and panic grass and feverfew. Especially in a circle at the center, sickle senna grew in extraordinary regeneration, not only standing among the charred remnants of the same plant but pushing up in new places, among bricks and through cracks in the asphalt. It actually seemed as if a load of sickle-senna seed had been dropped along with the bomb.”
― The New Yorker, The 40s: The Story of a Decade

“I’m sorry about the smell—that’s sort of a litter-box issue. It’s tough to have eight cats in a studio apartment, but I think while you’re spending the night here—the first of many, many passion-filled nights you’ll undoubtedly wish to spend here—you’ll find that it’s well worth the smell to have the selfless companionship of these seventeen reeking, dander-encrusted animals. I said “eight” before when I meant to say “seventeen.” That’s the number of cats that I have.”
― The New Yorker, The Big New Yorker Book of Cats

“Also, he had short black sideburns with streaks of gray in them, a boxer’s build, a Ph.D. in English literature from Harvard, and no wife or girlfriend. These qualities made Douglas a font of intrigue for the all-female population of St. Agnes—both the lay faculty and the students—but in truth Douglas led a sedentary life. He loved books, he was a passionate, solitary filmgoer, and he got his hair cut every four weeks by Chiapas, whose father ran a barbershop down the block.”
― The New Yorker, The Big New Yorker Book of Cats

“There are thirteen million women in the United States between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight. All of them were eligible to compete for the title of Miss America in the annual contest staged in Atlantic City last month if they were high-school graduates, were not and had never been married, and were not Negroes.”
― The New Yorker, The 40s: The Story of a Decade

“The median number of animals is thirty-nine, but many hoarders have more than a hundred. Hoarders, according to the consortium,”
― The New Yorker, The Big New Yorker Book of Cats

“Emerson was not the poet he had in mind in “The Poet.” In 1840, Alexis de Tocqueville had prophesied an American poetry free of “legendary lays,” “old traditions,” “supernatural beings,” masks, and personifications. Americans led “petty” and “insipid” lives, “crowded with paltry interests”: their lives were “anti-poetic.” The only subject possible for an American poet was humankind; luckily, as Tocqueville wrote, “the poet needs no more.” Emerson, who spent most of his life cultivating the aura of an elder, called for “a brood of Titans” who would “run up the mountains of the West with the errand of genius and love.”
― The New Yorker

“Next to Archangels, our most expensive cats are Abyssinians, which start at a hundred and seventy-five dollars.”
― The New Yorker, The Big New Yorker Book of Cats

“Cat owners is a term that belongs to the theater of the absurd, as both parties are aware.

Blessed are the cat-mad, for they shall be driven up the wall.

The cat poured itself off his shoulder like a caramel and sat down on the counter, gazing devotedly at the refrigerator.

What ultimately means most to a cat is to be the center of consideration. It is the only thing about which they never become cynical or disillusioned.

The slower and wiser serenity of aging cats, faithful, silent and enigmatic.

When they fail at charming us, they move so swiftly to the next meditation that we are hardly aware there has been an attempt, much less a failure.”
― The New Yorker Magazine

“Tiger Ladies are somewhat rare, but there are Cat Ladies and Bird Men all over the country, and often they end up in headlines like “201 CATS PULLED FROM HOME” and “PETS SAVED FROM HORROR HOME” and “CAT LOVER’S NEIGHBORS TIRED OF FELINE FIASCO.”
― The New Yorker, The Big New Yorker Book of Cats

“It was the last two days of the Nuremberg trial that I went abroad to see. Those men who had wanted to kill me and my kind and who had nearly had their wish were to be told whether I and my kind were to kill them and why. Quite an occasion.”
― The New Yorker, The 40s: The Story of a Decade

“had no moral right before God or man to close its doors to sick or suffering animals.”
― The New Yorker, The Big New Yorker Book of Cats

“Only women like cats, he said, and added disparagingly that this seemed to him “a very significant tip-off on the makeup of the two sexes.”
― The New Yorker, The Big New Yorker Book of Cats

“Miss Ross has room in her heart for the entire animal kingdom, she focusses principally on cats because she thinks they are victims of prejudice and bigotry.”
― The New Yorker, The Big New Yorker Book of Cats

“And when you take a house cat and put it in a situation in which there is only one choice, that of responding in a linear way to human expectations, the cat won’t eat if eating entails the performance of a kind of “pleasing” that is a violation of the cat’s nature, a distortion of the cat’s duties on the planet.”
― The New Yorker, The Big New Yorker Book of Cats

“The world knows it can’t win. Let me whisper I love you while we are dancing and the lights are low.”
― The New Yorker, The 40s: The Story of a Decade

“A study published by the Hoarding of Animals Research Consortium says that more than two-thirds of hoarders are females, and most often they hoard cats, although dogs, birds, farm animals, and, in one case, beavers, are hoarded as well.”
― The New Yorker, The Big New Yorker Book of Cats

“Cats, on the other hand, have character and independence. They are realists, and they understand perfectly their position in domestic life, which is decorative and nothing else.”
― The New Yorker, The Big New Yorker Book of Cats

“Cats have gained a bad reputation in some quarters because they’ve been pampered and have become neurotic.”
― The New Yorker, The Big New Yorker Book of Cats

“the average dog today is a sorry creature, functioning adequately neither as a guest in the house nor a servant.”
― The New Yorker, The Big New Yorker Book of Cats

“He had”
― The New Yorker, Christmas at The New Yorker: Stories, Poems, Humor, and Art

“She was one of six people accused of the murder, five of hom took pleas; to had internalised their guilt so deeply that, aven after being freed, they still had vivid memories of committing the crime.”
― The New Yorker Magazine

“America's favorite writer.”
― The New Yorker

“A dog has a million friends to a cat’s one,” she says. “Why, even snakes are sometimes praised!”
― The New Yorker, The Big New Yorker Book of Cats

“Throughout America, Main Street has run to the suburbs and hidden in the malls, but New York still wears Christmas on its sleeve.”
― The New Yorker, Christmas at The New Yorker: Stories, Poems, Humor, and Art

“Every war cleaves time.”
― The New Yorker, The 40s: The Story of a Decade