“To pull the chestnuts out of the fire with the cat's paw.”

“I didn't set fire to the building."
"No, but you did pull it into the river."
"That put the fire out!”

“When Jace opened the greenhouse door, the scent hit Clary, soft as the padded blow of a cat's paw…”

“Cats will amusingly tolerate humans only until someone comes up with a tin opener that can be operated with a paw.”

“(Cartoon title) A cat being cured of hairballs through a television ministry. (Voice on television) Place your right paw on the screen.”

“The only thing a cat worries about is what's happening right now. As we tell the kittens, you can only wash one paw at a time.”

“(Sylvia to blindfolded cat) Just put your paw on the map, and that's where we'll go for our vacation. It's a big country, and yet you picked Cleveland.”

“But it is no good using the tongs of reason to pull the Fundamentalists' chestnuts out of the fire of contradiction. Their real troubles lie elsewhere … Fundamentalists are panicked by the apparent disintegration of the family, the disappearance of certainty and the decay of morality. Fear leads them to ask, if we cannot trust the Bible, what can we trust? The truth or falsity of evolution is a secondary matter. Rationalists must listen to the complaints of the Fundamentalists with a psychiatrist's "third ear", and respond to the more subtle messages.”

“See how the child reaches out instinctively
To feel how fire will feel.
See how the man reaches out instinctively
For what he cannot have.
The pull and the push of it all.”

“Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me:
There lie they, and here lie we
Under the spreading chestnut tree.”