Gwen Cooper
Gwen Cooper is the New York Times bestselling author of the memoirs "Homer's Odyssey: A Fearless Feline Tale, or How I Learned About Love and Life with a Blind Wonder Cat" and "Homer: The Ninth Life of a Blind Wonder Cat," and the novels "Love Saves the Day" and "Diary of a South Beach Party Girl."
Her latest project is "Curl Up with a Cat Tale," a first-of-its-kind monthly short-story series, featuring an all-new--and all-true!--humorous and heartfelt tale each and every month about life with her world-famous fur family. (See my website, www.gwencooper.com/cat-tales, for more details and a 60% discount!). Her work has been published in nearly two dozen languages.
Gwen lives in Manhattan with her husband, Laurence. She also lives with her two perfect cats--Clayton the Tripod and his litter-mate, Fanny--who aren't impressed with any of it.
“What happened was that I caught a glimpse of something I desperately needed to believe in at that point in my life. I wanted to believe there could be something within you that was so essential and so courageous that nothing - no boyfriend, no employer, no trauma - could tarnish or rob you of it. And if you had that kind of unbreakable core, not only would it always be yours, but even in your darkest moments others would see it in you, and help you out before the worse came to the absolute worst.”
“He had curled himself up into a minature sphere in the farthest corner of the box, a fuzzy softball that would have fit eaisly into the palm of my hand.”
“I'd understood that when you see something so fundamentally worthwhile in somebody else, you don't look for all the reasons that might keep it out of your life. You commit to being strong enough to build your life around it, no matter what. In doing so, you begin to become the thing you admire.”
“Mocho was a Spanish word that meant maimed or referred to something that had been lopped off like a stump. To call Homer el mocho was, essentially, to call him "Stumpy" or "the maimed one." It doesn't sound particularly flattering, but among Spanish speakers the giving of nicknames is tantamount to a declaration of love. Things that would sound insulting outright in English were tokens of deep affection when said in Spanish.”
“A friend once asked me why it was that stories about animals and their heroism...are so compelling....we love them because they're the closest thing we have to material evidence of an objective moral order--or, to put it another way, they're the closest thing we have to proof of the existence of God. They seem to prove that the things that matter to and move us the most--things like love, courage, loyalty, altruism--aren't just ideas we made up from nothing. To see them demonstrated in other animals proves they're real things, that they exist in the world independently of what humans invent and tell each other in the form of myth or fable.”
“Eğer Homeros'tan öğrendiğim aziz ve kıymetli bir hayat dersi varsa,o da bir canlının vaktini doldurmak için,zahmete değer projeler yaratmasının aslında ne kadar önemli olduğudur.”
“So I didn't adopt Homer because he was cute and little and sweet, or because he was helpless and needed me. I adopted him because when you think you see something so fundamentally worthwhile in someone else, you don't look for the reasons - like bad timing or a negative bank balance - that might keep it out of your life. You commit to being strong enough to build your life around it, no matter what. In doing so, you begin to become the thing you admire.”
“My philosophy when it came to pets was much like that of having children: You got what you got, and you loved them unconditionally regardless of whatever their personalities or flaws turned out to be. ”