There are only three sins - causing pain, causing fear, and causing anguish. The rest is window dressing.

For me a house or an apartment becomes a home when you add one set of four legs, a happy tail, and that indescribable measure of love that we call a dog.

Being patted is what it is all about.

It looks like a miniature hippopotamus with badly-fitting panty hose all over.

It doesn't matter where you are in your own personal development, nor has it mattered where you have been culturally; dogs simply don't pass judgment on you the way all of the rest of life and all your other companions seem to.

A cat knows how to be comfortable, how to get the people around it to serve it. In a tranquil domestic situation, the cat is a veritable manipulative genius. It seeks the soft, it seeks the warm, it prefers the quiet and it loves to be full. It displays, when it gets its own way in these matters, a degree of contentment we would all like to emulate.

It's our mortality that terrifies us, because what we're really seeking is immortality - that is, after all, a fool's errand.