Gerald Durrell famous quotes

A house is not a home until it has a dog.
-- Gerald Durrell

#Family #Dog #Home

Until we consider animal life to be worthy of the consideration and reverence we bestow upon old books and pictures and historic monuments, there will always be the animal refugee living a precarious life on the edge of extermination, dependent for existence on the charity of a few human beings.
-- Gerald Durrell

#Book #Animal #Charity

There is no first world and third world. There is only one world, for all of us to live and delight in.
-- Gerald Durrell

#Delight #World #Firsts

In conservation, the motto should always be 'never say die'.
-- Gerald Durrell

#Conservation #Motto #Should

Aspirin is so good for roses, brandy for sweet peas, and a squeeze of lemon-juice for the fleshy flowers, like begonias.
-- Gerald Durrell

#Sweet #Flower #Rose

You cannot begin to preserve any species of animal unless you preserve the habitat in which it dwells. Disturb or destroy that habitat and you will exterminate the species as surely as if you had shot it. So conservation means that we have to preserve forest and grassland, river and lake, even the sea itself. This is vital not only for the preservation of animal life generally, but for the future existence of man himself-a point that seems to escape many people.
-- Gerald Durrell

#Mean #Men #Animal

Animals generally return the love you lavish on them by a swift bite in passing-not unlike friends and wives.
-- Gerald Durrell

#Love You #Animal #Wife

They were maps that lived, maps that one could study, frown over, and add to; maps, in short, that really meant something.
-- Gerald Durrell

#Add #Maps #Study

All over the world the wildlife that I write about is in grave danger. It is being exterminated by what we call the progress of civilization.
-- Gerald Durrell

#Writing #Civilization #Progress

By neglecting our garden, we are storing up for ourselves, in the not very distant future, a world catastrophe as bad as any atomic war, and we are doing it with all the bland complacency of an idiot child chopping up a Rembrandt with a pair of scissors.
-- Gerald Durrell

#Children #War #Garden

I can't be expected to produce deathless prose in an atmosphere of gloom and eucalyptus.
-- Gerald Durrell

#Atmosphere #Produce #Prose

What fools we are, eh? What fools, sitting here in the sun, singing. And of love, too! I am too old for it and you are too young, and yet we waste our time singing about it. Ah, well, let's have a glass of wine, eh?
-- Gerald Durrell

#Wine #Glasses #Singing

Right in the Hart of the Africn Jungel a small wite man lives. Now there is one xtrordenry fackt about him that he is the frind of all animals.
-- Gerald Durrell

#Animal #Men #Hart

Among the myrtles the mantids moved, lightly, carefully, swaying slightly, the quintessence of evil. They were lank and green, with chinless faces and monstrous globular eyes, frosty gold, with an expression of intense, predatory madness in them. The crooked arms, with their fringes of sharp teeth, would be raised in mock supplication to the insect world, so humble, so fervent, trembling slightly when a butterfly flew too close.
-- Gerald Durrell

#Eye #Humble #Butterfly

The great ecosystems are like complex tapestries - a million complicated threads, interwoven, make up the whole picture. Nature can cope with small rents in the fabric; it can even, after a time, cope with major disasters like floods, fires, and earthquakes. What nature cannot cope with is the steady undermining of its fabric by the activities of man.
-- Gerald Durrell

#Men #Fire #Ecosystems

Erosion, desertification, and pollution have become our lot. It is a weird form of suicide, for we are bleeding our planet to death.
-- Gerald Durrell

#Suicide #Suicidal #Erosion

My childhood in Corfu shaped my life. If I had the craft of Merlin, I would give every child the gift of my childhood.
-- Gerald Durrell

#Children #Giving #Childhood

‎'All we need is a book,' roared Leslie; 'don't panic, hit 'em with a book.
-- Gerald Durrell

#Book #Needs #Ems

Each day had a tranquility a timelessness about it so that you wished it would never end. But then the dark skin of the night would peel off and there would be a fresh day waiting for us glossy and colorful as a child's transfer and with the same tinge of unreality.
-- Gerald Durrell

#Children #Dark #Night

We stared at the odd garment and wondered what it was for. 'What is it?' asked Larry at length. 'It's a bathing costume, of course,' said Mother. 'What on earth did you think it was?' 'It looks like a badly skinned whale,' said Larry, peering at it closely.
-- Gerald Durrell

#Mother #Thinking #Whales

I do wish you wouldn't argue with me when I'm knitting.
-- Gerald Durrell

#Knitting #Wish #Arguing

Why keep in touch with them? That's what I want to know,' asked Larry despairingly. 'What satisfaction does it give you? They're all either fossilized or mental.' 'Indeed, they're not mental,' said Mother indignantly. 'Nonsense, Mother... Look at Aunt Bertha, keeping flocks of imaginary cats... and there's Great-Uncle Patrick, who wanders about nude and tells complete strangers how he killed whales with a penknife...They're all bats.
-- Gerald Durrell

#Mother #Uncles #Cat

Remember that the animals and plants have no M.P. they can write to; they can't perform sit-down strikes or, indeed, strikes of any sort; they have nobody to speak for them except us, the human beings who share the world with them but do not own it.
-- Gerald Durrell

#Writing #Animal #World

Zoos should concentrate more on the preservation side of things.
-- Gerald Durrell

#Zoos #Sides #Should

As I watched the pulsing fire among the trees and heard the beat of the drum merge and tremble with the voices, forming an intricate pattern of sound, I knew that someday I would have to return or be haunted forever by the beauty and mystery that is Africa.
-- Gerald Durrell

#Voice #Fire #Tree

Gradually the magic of the island [Corfu] settled over us as gently and clingingly as pollen.
-- Gerald Durrell

#Islands #Magic #Pollen

If naturalists go to heaven (about which there is considerable ecclesiastical doubt), I hope that I will be furnished with a troop of kakapo to amuse me in the evening instead of television.
-- Gerald Durrell

#Heaven #Doubt #Television

I said I *liked* being half-educated; you were so much more *surprised* at everything when you were ignorant.
-- Gerald Durrell

#Knowledge #Ignorant #Half

Tea would arrive, the cakes squatting on cushions of cream, toast in a melting shawl of butter, cups agleam and a faint wisp of steam rising from the teapot shawl.
-- Gerald Durrell

#Cake #Tea #Rising