175 Quotes by Richard Adams

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.

Well, there’s another place—another country, isn’t there? We go there when we sleep; at other times, too; and when we die.

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

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.

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 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.

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 is no bargain, for here, what is, is what must be.

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.

Once the moon gets to be full somebody - some man or other - goes up every day and slices bits of one side until there isn't any more,and then after a bit a new one grows. Men do that with all sorts of things, actually - rose bushes for instance.... The man who slices the bits off brings them down here and then they're used for making those lights on the cars. Clever isn't it... They only last about one night, I should think, because you hardly ever see them shining by day.