cat
Once a stray cat came in during the night. We put a hatbox for it on the WC, and it had kittens inside. I sometimes feel like a stray cat without a hatbox.
Letter to Maria Tuinzing, Westerbork, August 11, 1943, in Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941–1943 (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2002), 636.
It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were no reindeers. But there were cats.
“A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” in The Collected Stories (New York: New Directions, 1986), 296.
When I am composed I feel no need of affiliating myself with anybody. There is a lot of the cat in me, and cats are not joiners.
“Compost,” in One Man’s Meat (New York: Harper & Row, 1944), 159.