Early Friday five.

Five quotes from I Am a Cat, which I didn't love but I found the cat's narrative very entertaining, and which even non-cat people will appreciate, in no particular order:

• "I move forward between the woodpile and the coal heap, turn left and find a glazed window to my right. On the ledge below, a considerable number of small round tubs is piled into a pyramid. My heart goes out to them, for it must be painfully contrary to a round thing's concept of reality to be constricted within a triangular world."
• "I desire to pray for success in war by worshiping my honored Great Tail Gracious Deity, so I lower my head a little, only to find I am not facing in the right direction. When I make the three appropriate obeisances I should, of course, as far as it is possible, be facing toward my tail. But as I turn my body to fulfill that requirement, my tail moves away from me. In an effort to catch up with myself, I twist my neck. But still my tail eludes me. Being a thing so sacred, containing as it does the entire universe in its three-inch length, my tail is inevitably beyond my power to control. I spun round in pursuit of it seven and a half times but, feeling quite exhausted, I finally gave up. I feel a trifle giddy. For a moment I lose all sense of where I am and, deciding that my whereabouts are totally unimportant, I start to walk about at random..."
• "In my opinion, there is nothing more unbecoming in the human type than its indecent habit of sleeping with the mouth left open. Never in a lifetime would a cat be caught in such degenerate conduct... The result is not only unsightly, but could indeed, when rat shit drops from the rafters, involve real risk to health."
• "Anyway, human beings being the nitwits that they are, a purring approach to any of them, either male or female, is usually interpreted as proof that I love them, and they consequently let me do as I like, and on occasions, poor dumb creatures, they even stroke my head."
• "Actually, a mirror is a sinister thing. I'm told it takes real courage, alone at night, in a large room lit by a single candle, to stare into a mirror. Indeed the first time that my master's eldest daughter shoved a mirror in front of my face, I was so simultaneously startled and alarmed that I ran around the house three times without stopping."