Morris The Cat Quotes

Let us roam then, you and I, When the evening is splayed out across the sky [...] Paths that follow like a nagging accusation Of a minor violation To lead you to the ultimate reproof ... Oh, do not say, 'Bad kitty!' Let us go and prowl the city. In the rooms the cats run to and fro Auditioning for a Broadway show." (From The Love Song of J. Morris Housecat)

And indeed there will be time To wonder, 'Do I shed?' and, 'Do I shed?' Time to turn back and stretch out on the bed, And give myself a bath before I'm fed -- (They will say: 'It's the short-haired ones I prefer.') My flea collar buckled neatly in my fur, My expression cool and distant but softened by a gentle purr -- (They will say: 'I'm allergic to his fur!') Do I dare Jump up on the table? In an instant there is time For excursions and inversions that will make me seem unstable." (From The Love Song of J. Morris Housecat)

...of eighteen kittens reared in the company of rodents, only three became rodent-killers later on. The other fifteen could not be trained to kill later by seeing other cats killing. For them the rodents had become 'family' and were no longer 'prey'. Even the three killers would not attack rodents of the same species as the one with which they were reared.

He drew a mouth on the cat and filled it with sharp teeth, so it looked a little like a mountain lion, and as he drew he began to sing, in a reedy tenor voice, “When I were a young man my father would say It’s lovely outside, you should go out to play, But now that I’m older, the ladies all say, It’s nice out, but put it away…” Morris

Heaven is a warm cat and a good book.

You must be a cat, because you sure have more lives than anyone else here.

One early terracotta statuette from Catal Huyuk in Anatolia depicts an enthroned female in the act of giving birth, supported by two cat-like animals that form her seat (Plate 1). This figure has been identified as a 'birth goddess' and it is this type of early image that has led a number of feminist scholars to posit a 'reign of the goddess' in ancient Near Eastern prehistory. Maria Gimbutas, for whom such images are proof of a perfect matriarchal society in 'Old Europe' , presents an ideal vision in which a socially egalitarian matriarchal culture was overthrown by a destructive patriarchy (Gimbutas 1991). Gerda Lerner has argued for a similar situation in the ancient Near East; however, she does not discuss nude figurines at any length (Lerner 1986a: 147). More recently, critiques of the matriarchal model of prehistory have pointed out the flaws in this methodology (e.g. Conkey and Tringham 1995; Meskell 1995; Goodison and Morris 1998). In all these critiques the identification of such figures as goddesses is rejected as a modern myth. There is no archaeological evidence that these ancient communities were in fact matriarchal, nor is there any evidence that female deities were worshipped exclusively. Male gods may have worshipped simultaneously with the 'mother goddesses' if such images are indeed representations of deities. Nor do such female figures glorify or show admiration for the female body; rather they essentialise it, reducing it to nothing more nor less than a reproductive vessel. The reduction of the head and the diminution of the extremities seem to stress the female form as potentially reproductive, but to what extent this condition was seen as sexual, erotic or matriarchal is unclear. ....Despite the correct rejection of the 'Mother Goddess' and utopian matriarchy myths by recent scholarship, we should not loose track of the overwhelming evidence that the image of female nudity was indeed one of power in ancient Mesopotamia. The goddess Ishtar/Inanna was but one of several goddesses whose erotic allure was represented as a powerful attribute in the literature of the ancient Near East. In contact to the naked male body which was the focus of a variety of meanings in the visual arts, female nudity was always associated with sexuality, and in particular with powerful sexual attraction, Akkadian *kuzbu*. This sexuality was not limited to Ishtar and her cult. As a literary topos, sensuousness is a defining quality for both mortal women and goddesses. In representational art, the nude woman is portrayed in a provocative pose, as the essence of the feminine. For femininity, sexual allure, *kuzbu*, the ideal of the feminine, was thus expressed as nudity in both visual and verbal imagery. While several iconographic types of unclothed females appear in Mesopotamian representations of the historical period - nursing mothers, women in acts of sexual intercourse, entertainers such as dancers and musicians, and isolated frontally represented nudes with or without other attributes - and while these nude female images may have different iconographic functions, the ideal of femininity and female sexuality portrayed in them is similar. -Zainab Bahrani, Women of Babylon: Gender and Representation in Mesopotamia

Dogs look up to you, cats look down on you. Give me a pig – he just looks you in the eye and treats you as an equal.

Everyone reading this must believe me when I say Prince possessed genius. Unprecedented genius. Think back to Elvis, the cat some folk say invented rock and roll. Elvis was cool. Elvis had a look. He sang. Worked his pelvis. Drove the girls crazy. Would never dis Elvis for borrowing from black music 'cause he publicly acknowledged his masters. He loved him some B.B. King. He respected Ray Charles. He covered Ray's songs. But if they call Elvis the King, they're gonna have to call Prince the World Emperor. I say that cause, unlike Prince, Elvis did not write. Elvis did not arrange. Elvis did not play killer guitar. And when I say that Prince wrote and arranged, I mean he wrote and arranged literally thousands of songs under so many different names that he forgot half of them. And when I say Prince played guitar, I mean he blended the styles of all the guitar gurus and then added a fantastic flair all his own. He did more than arrange. He created a sound that, nearly half a century later, sounds as fresh as it did when Grand Central was tearing the roofs of every school auditorium in the Twin Cities.

St John had been sitting in the back garden twizzling a pencil, on the end of which a russet deposit was impaled, which had been left on the lawn by Marmaduke, next door’s ginger cat. His father had wandered in to the garden and seen St John mesmerised by the twirling mahogany baton. “What are you doing son?” he asked. “Toasting a witch”, St John replied.

When I jumped from the bottom rung of the fire escape into a puddle of smelly water, there was Davy’s cat. She had a rat by the throat and looked at me with fierce eyes. The rat thought it could outrun her. Big mistake.

What?” Carol said. “You think I just crack under pressure?” Abby thought she could see a dramatic increase in Carol. She got it. “Well, it was a lot of pressure,” Carol blurted, her voice rising. “Like super pressure. Pressure like the heaviest thing in the world on top of me, plus three hundred elephants, two hundred walruses, and several of those super fat cats whose owners don’t stop feeding them—that kind of pressure. And they all ate extra donuts for breakfast.” “I

the greatest pleasure I get from my Abyssinian cat Menelik is the feeling that I have, by the very magnetism of my affection, summoned him from some wild place, some forest or moorland, temporarily to sharpen his claws purring upon my knee.