“One cat just leads to another."[Letter from Finca Vigia, Cuba, to his first wife, Elizabeth Hadley Richardson (1943).]”

“A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.”

“you can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.”

“Going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.”

“He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only dreamed of places now and the lions on the beach. They played like young cats in the dusk and he loved them as he loved the boy. He never dreamed about the boy. He simply woke, looked out the open door at the moon and unrolled his trousers and put them on.”

“If a four-letter man marries a five-letter woman, he was thinking, what number of letters would their children be?”

“Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.”