Richard Adams

“A thing can be true and still be desperate folly, Hazel.”

“My heart has joined the Thousand, for my friend stopped running today.”

“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 do...”

“There is not a day or night but a doe offers her life for her kittens, or some honest captain of Owsla his life for his Chief Rabbit's. Sometimes it is taken, sometimes it is not. But there...”

“Would that the dead were not dead! But there is grass that must be eaten, pellets that must be chewed, hraka that must be passed, holes that must be dug, sleep that must be slept.”

“This was their way of honoring the dead. The story over, the demands of their own hard, rough lives began to re-assert themselves in their hearts, in their nerves, their blood and appetites....”

“Plot as such is not a major ingredient in my novels... it's often better to sail on the unconscious sea.”

“You know how you let yourself think that everything will be alright if you can only go to certain place or do a certain thing. But when you get there you find it's not that simple.”

“I dislike this whole business of experimentation on animals, unless there's some very good and altogether exceptional reason to this very case. The thing that gets me is that it's not possib...”