Richard Adams famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

I have learned that with creatures one loves, suffering is not the only thing for which one may pity them. A rabbit who does not know when a gift has made him safe is poorer than a slug, even though he may think otherwise himself.
-- Richard Adams

#Thinking #Suffering #Doe
They're all so much afraid of the Council that they're not afraid of anything else.
-- Richard Adams

#Fear #Not Afraid #Council
There is nothing that cuts you down to size like coming to some strange and marvelous place where no one even stops to notice that you stare about you.
-- Richard Adams

#Cutting #Size #Strange
All the world will be your enemy, Prince of a Thousand enemies. And when they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you; digger, listener, runner, Prince with the swift warning. Be cunning, and full of tricks, and your people will never be destroyed.
-- Richard Adams

#People #Enemy #Warning
We are all human and fall short of where we need to be. We must never stop trying to be the best we can be.
-- Richard Adams

#Fall #Trying #Needs
You know how you let yourself think that everything will be all right if you can only get to a certain place or do a certain thing. But when you get there you find it's not that simple.
-- Richard Adams

#Simple #Thinking #Certain
A thing can be true and still be desperate folly.
-- Richard Adams

#Desperate #Being True #Folly
People who record birdsong generally do it very early-before six o'clock-if they can. Soon after that, the invasion of distant noise in most woodland becomes too constant and too loud.
-- Richard Adams

#People #Bird #Records
Men will never rest till they've spoiled the earth and destroyed the animals.
-- Richard Adams

#Men #Animal #Earth
Rabbits live close to death and when death comes closer than usual, thinking about survival leaves little room for anything else.
-- Richard Adams

#Thinking #Survival #Littles
Sooner or later, everyone has to meet his match.
-- Richard Adams

#Sooner Or Later
How do they find out with the experiments?''...one way they can find out a whole lot is to make an animal ill and then try different ways to make it better until they find one that works.''But isn't that unkind to the animal?''Well, I suppose it is...but I mean, there isn't a dad anywhere who would hesitate, is there, if he knew it was going to make [his child] better? It's changed the whole world during the last hundred years, and that's no exaggeration.
-- Richard Adams

#Dad #Children #Mean
I distinguish two types of human beings, Love people, who love the sky and the flowers, and Power People, who are essentially sold on naked power.
-- Richard Adams

#Flower #Sky #Two
Like the pain of a bad wound, the effect of a deep shock takes some while to be felt. When a child is told, for the first time in his life, that a person he has known is dead, although he does not disbelieve it, he may well fail to comprehend it and later ask--perhaps more than once--where the dead person is and when he is coming back.
-- Richard Adams

#Pain #Children #Doe
At that moment, in the sunset on Watership Down, there was offered to General Woundwort the opportunity to show whether he was really the leader of vision and genius which he believed himself to be, or whether he was no more than a tyrant with the courage and cunning of a pirate. For one beat of his pulse the lame rabbit's idea shone clearly before him. He grasped it and realized what it meant. The next, he had pushed it away from him.
-- Richard Adams

#Sunset #Opportunity #Tyrants
I've always said that Watership Down is not a book for children. I say: it's a book, and anyone who wants to read it can read it.
-- Richard Adams

#Children #Book #Want
I certainly think that 10 to 20 years from now, clearly the majority of veterinarians will be women.
-- Richard Adams

#Thinking #Years #Majority
Our children's children will hear a good story.
-- Richard Adams

#Children #Stories #Our Children
Bluebell had been saying that he knew the men hated us for raiding their crops and gardens, and Toadflax answered, 'That wasn't why they destroyed the warren. It was just because we were in their way. They killed us to suit themselves.
-- Richard Adams

#Men #Garden #Way
Dangerous thing, a name. Someone might catch hold of you by it, mightn't they?
-- Richard Adams

#Names #Might #Dangerous
Rabbits need dignity and above all the will to accept their fate.
-- Richard Adams

#Fate #Rabbits #Needs
If a rabbit gave advice and the advice wasn't accepted, he immediately forgot it, and so did everyone else.
-- Richard Adams

#Advice #Rabbits #Accepted
The Threarah doesn't like anything he hasn't thought of for himself.
-- Richard Adams
We all have to meet our match sometime or other.
-- Richard Adams
Who knows why men do anything?
-- Richard Adams

#Men #Why Me
To come to the end of a time of anxiety and fear! To feel the cloud that hung over us lift and disperse - that cloud that dulled the heart and made happiness no more than a memory! This at least is one joy that must have been known by almost every living creature.
-- Richard Adams

#Memories #Heart #Clouds
If you want to bless me you can bless my bottom, for it is sticking out of the hole.
-- Richard Adams

#Want #Bless #Holes

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