Gerald Durrell Quotes

#1. 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

#2. I hope that, in a small way, I am interesting people in animal life and in its conservation. If I accomplish this I will consider that I have achieved something worth while. And if I can, later on, help even slightly towards preventing an animal from becoming extinct, I will be content.

Gerald Durrell

#3. 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

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

Gerald Durrell

#5. A house is not a home until it has a dog.

Gerald Durrell

#6. Larry was always full of ideas about things of which he had no experience.

Gerald Durrell

#7. But throughout my life I have rarely if ever achieved what I wanted by tackling it in a logical fashion.

Gerald Durrell

#8. It was no half-hearted spring, this: the whole island vibrated with it as though a great, ringing chord had been struck. Everyone and everything heard it and responded.

Gerald Durrell

#9. When man continues to destroy nature, he saws the very branch on which he sits since the rational protection of nature is at the same time the protection of mankind

Gerald Durrell

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

Gerald Durrell

#11. Gradually the magic of the island [Corfu] settled over us as gently and clingingly as pollen.

Gerald Durrell

#12. It was my birthday. I lay there savouring the feeling of having a whole day to myself when people would give me presents and the family would be forced to accede to any reasonable requests.

Gerald Durrell

#13. If some people want to believe in Jesus, or Mohammed, or Buddha, or their ancestors, who is to say which is right and which wrong? It seems to me that most of the religions in the world are too dogmatic. They preach the 'live and let live' philosophy, but rarely do they practise it.

Gerald Durrell

#14. 'All we need is a book,' roared Leslie; 'don't panic, hit 'em with a book.

Gerald Durrell

#15. I believe that all children should be surrounded by books and animals.

Gerald Durrell

#16. There is a pleasure sure
In being mad, which none but madmen know.
Dryden, The Spanish Friar II, i

Gerald Durrell

#17. I do wish you wouldn't argue with me when I'm knitting.

Gerald Durrell

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. The Magenpies, obviously suspecting Larry of being a dope smuggler, had fought valiantly with the time of bicarbonate of soda, and had scattered its contents along a line of books, so that they looked like a snow-covered mountain range.

Gerald Durrell

#21. There is no first world and third world. There is only one world, for all of us to live and delight in.

Gerald Durrell

#22. 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

#23. 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

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

Gerald Durrell

#25. High time he had another tutor,' said Larry. 'You leave the house for five minutes and come back and find him disembowelling Moby Dick on the front porch.' 'I'm sure he didn't mean any harm,' said Mother, ' but it was rather silly for him to do it on the veranda.

Gerald Durrell

#26. In conservation, the motto should always be 'never say die'.

Gerald Durrell

#27. 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

#28. The most wonderful, beautiful things in life are the simple things which we have all forgotten.

Gerald Durrell

#29. Zoos should concentrate more on the preservation side of things.

Gerald Durrell

#30. I can't be expected to produce deathless prose in an atmosphere of gloom and eucalyptus.

Gerald Durrell

#31. The owls appeared now, drifting from tree to tree as silently as flakes of soot, hooting in astonishment as the moon rose higher and higher, turning to pink, then gold, and finally riding in a nest of stars, like a silver bubble.

Gerald Durrell

#32. 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

#33. Overflowing with the milk of human kindness, the family had invited everyone they could think of, including people they cordially disliked.

Gerald Durrell

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

Gerald Durrell

#35. The uncivilized behavior of some human beings in a zoo has to be seen to be believed.

Gerald Durrell

#36. 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

#37. Roger and I would squat in the heavily scented shade of the myrtle bushes and watch the array of creatures that passed us; at certain times of the day the branches were as busy as the main street of a town.

Gerald Durrell

#38. So I went instead and tasted Taki's new white wine. Spiridion! what a wine ... like the blood of a dragon and smooth as a fish ...

Gerald Durrell

#39. 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

#40. Well," said Larry with dignity, "it may give you pleasure to be woken at half-past three in the morning by a pigeon who seems intent on pushing his rectum into your eye...

Gerald Durrell

#41. She would seize every opportunity to dive into the bathroom, in a swirl of white towels, and once in there she was as hard to dislodge as a limpet from a rock.

Gerald Durrell

#42. Well, they're queer; but they're all very old, and so they're bound to be. But they're not mental,' explained Mother; adding candidly, 'Anyway, not enough to be put away.

Gerald Durrell

#43. 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

#44. It's all your fault, Mother,' said Larry austerely; 'you shouldn't have brought us up to be so selfish.' 'I like that!' exclaimed Mother. 'I never did anything of the sort!' 'Well, we didn't get as selfish as this without some guidance,' said Larry.

Gerald Durrell

#45. 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

#46. Ask the average person his views on snakes and he will, within the space of ten minutes, talk more nonsense than a brace of politicians.

Gerald Durrell