Homer's Odyssey Quotes
"How could I renege on my duty to alleviate suffering if I could maintain a life worth living?"
"Ask any young, idealistic vets, and they’ll likely confess to the same kind of sin I committed the day this blind kitten came my way."
"How could I help but be smitten with his scraggly little blackness, his tiny sunken sockets, his insatiable appetite for feedings, pettings, cuddlings, and play sessions?"
"Homer will always remind me that there’s nothing a partnership between a veterinarian, a loving owner, and one fighting patient can’t achieve."
"Every leap from a chair back or table-top is taken on faith, a potential leap into the abyss."
"Every step forward taken without guidance into the dark void of the world around him is a miracle of courage."
"I made my first truly adult decision about a relationship."
"You commit to being strong enough to build your life around it, no matter what."
"When you think you see something so fundamentally worthwhile in someone else, you don't look for the reasons that might keep it out of your life."
"Once he realized there was a purpose to the sound, and that the sound came from me, he made a fast-trot beeline toward it and the food bowl."
"His nose bumped into the small mound of moist food, and he took a few eager bites."
"At the light splashing sound my fingers made in the water, Homer raised his head from the moist food and cocked it slightly to one side."
"I wasn’t sure if Homer found this entertaining or if he was doing what he thought I wanted him to do."
"The blackness of it, in the middle of that plastic cone and unbroken by color of any kind, looked like the velvety black heart of a sunflower."
"Many cats are shy of newcomers—it’s one of their most common traits."
"But holding Homer, something in her seemed to unbend. Her face lit up in a way I’d never seen."
"But one of the first things I learned about Homer the following morning was how ecstatic he was merely to wake up."
"His singsong purring continued unabated, audible even from where I sat clear across the room."
"To say that he must have regarded these things as miraculous would be assuming too much similarity between a kitten’s mind and a human’s."
"I will always keep you safe, little boy," I would murmur, caressing his fur while he slept.
"He might have known that he would not prevail with her, for when the gods have made up their minds they do not change them lightly."
"Nobody could tell Homer what his potential was, and they can't tell me."
"Just because you couldn't see the light at the end of the tunnel didn't mean it wasn't there."
"He’s a terror. You’ve never seen such a sure-footed ball of energy in your life."
"Sometimes it’s possible to know two completely contradictory things at the same time, and to believe with equal certainty that both of them are true."
"The resentment was second only to the devastation you would feel if you lost that someone altogether."
"An accident was something you would go out of your way to avoid if you had the chance to do things over. A surprise was something you hadn’t even known you’d wanted until you got it."
"It rests with heaven to decide who shall be chief among us, but you shall be master in your own house and over your own possessions."
"Ill deeds do not prosper, and the weak confound the strong."
"A second ago you were all in rags, and now you are like some god come down from heaven."
"The most maddening thing to accept is that there usually isn’t a why."
"Not knowing makes it impossible to avoid having the exact same thing happen again. But it’s also liberating."
"The world could be dangerous and bad things sometimes happened, but there was nothing you could do except live your life."
"Once upon a time, I had saved Homer’s life. And now, years later, he had saved mine."
"The beauty of having nothing to lose is that you have everything to gain."
"What is it all worth if you have no one to share it with?"
"My best friend, Andrea, had recently moved to New York from California with the boyfriend she would undoubtedly soon be engaged to."
"He was a cat who hadn’t slept in the city that never sleeps. Homer was already a New Yorker."
"It still felt good to realize that I wasn’t the only one who found Homer irresistible."
"The smallness of my new apartment, which had caused so much initial consternation, soon came to feel like a blessing."
"Spring came eventually, as spring is apt to do, and if there’s anything more gorgeous than Manhattan in springtime, I’ve never seen it."
"Pets can adapt to so much more than we give them credit for."
"The next zone they call will be mine, I kept telling myself."
"I just want to get back to my cats. Please, sir, please, please let me in."
"I’ve been trying to get back to them for days and days."
"My cats would die because I hadn’t changed my driver’s license."
"The silence of the streets had felt unnatural until something broke it—and then the sound was even more out of place."
"I had been prepared, as circumstances dictated, to fake-cry as a way of gaining sympathy. There was nothing I wouldn’t stoop to at this point."
"The prospect of picking up the phone and making a single call that would, if it went the way I hoped, change the entire course of my life was terrifying."
"I had come to take my cats’ omnipresence for granted—nor would I have wanted it any other way; why have pets if they weren’t around?"
"I spent a lot of time thinking about how to make life with Scarlett bearable for Laurence—and if it took longer than I would have liked to arrive at a solution, it was only because I’d never been in this particular situation."
"The solution I finally devised solved both problems at once."
"I can’t quite say that they bonded, but her philosophy seemed to be, I don’t like you, and you don’t like me, but I will accept your food and leave you alone."
"Laurence didn’t even really think of Homer as being blind; once he saw the ease and energy with which Homer got around, he accepted it as a given that Homer was essentially the same as any other cat."
"Perhaps the only time Homer wasn’t afraid of Laurence was when Laurence was in the kitchen."
"No, it wasn’t. But Laurence was a grown man, and Homer knew the word no, and I saw no logical reason for all these shenanigans."
"I was the tiniest bit flabbergasted. It seemed incredible to me that anybody could be unaware that, of course, different cats would have different personalities."
"It was just short of another year from the time we started planning until the wedding day itself."
"The one thing I knew for sure about our future was that it could be anything we wanted it to be."