{"author":"Richard Adams","author_id":"Richard+Adams","total_quotes":35,"quotes":[{"text":"They want to be natural, the anti-social little beasts. They just don't realize that everyone's good depends on everyone's cooperation.","author":"Richard Adams","tags":["socialism"],"id":4723,"author_id":"Richard+Adams"},{"text":"Bigwig: 'I can't think why he didn't convince Threarah.'Hazel: 'Because Threarah doesn't like anything he hasn't thought of for himself.","author":"Richard Adams","tags":["innovation","poor-leadership","stagnant","stubbornness"],"id":24785,"author_id":"Richard+Adams"},{"text":"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.","author":"Richard Adams","tags":["expectations","expectations-vs-reality","life-lessons","life","reality","watership-down"],"id":27565,"author_id":"Richard+Adams"},{"text":"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. 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. Odysseus brings not one man to shore with him. Yet he sleeps sound beside Calypso and when he wakes thinks only of Penelope.","author":"Richard Adams","tags":["death","life","rabbits","wild-life"],"id":50644,"author_id":"Richard+Adams"},{"text":"Rabbits (says Mr. Lockley) are like human beings in many ways. One of these is certainly their staunch ability to withstand disaster and to let the stream of their life carry them along, past reaches of terror and loss. They have a certain quality which it would not be accurate to describe as callousness or indifference. It is, rather, a blessedly circumscribed imagination and an intuitive feeling that Life is Now. A foraging wild creature, intent above all upon survival, is as strong as the grass.","author":"Richard Adams","tags":["animal","human","resiliency","richard-adams","survival","watership-down"],"id":53830,"author_id":"Richard+Adams"},{"text":"You can't call your life your own: and in return you have safety, if it's worth having at the price you pay.","author":"Richard Adams","tags":["freedom","government","politics"],"id":124605,"author_id":"Richard+Adams"},{"text":"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.","author":"Richard Adams","tags":["bizarre","conspiracy","dogs","moon"],"id":141577,"author_id":"Richard+Adams"},{"text":"My heart has joined the Thousand, for my friend stopped running today.","author":"Richard Adams","tags":["death","grief","loss"],"id":168968,"author_id":"Richard+Adams"},{"text":"The full moon, well risen in a cloudless eastern sky, covered the high solitude with its light. We are not conscious of daylight as that which displaces darkness. Daylight, even when the sun is clear of clouds, seems to us simply the natural condition of the earth and air. When we think of the downs, we think of the downs in daylight, as with think of a rabbit with its fur on. Stubbs may have envisaged the skeleton inside the horse, but most of us do not: and we do not usually envisage the downs without daylight, even though the light is not a part of the down itself as the hide is part of the horse itself. We take daylight for granted. But moonlight is another matter. It is inconstant. The full moon wanes and returns again. Clouds may obscure it to an extent to which they cannot obscure daylight. Water is necessary to us, but a waterfall is not. Where it is to be found it is something extra, a beautiful ornament. We need daylight and to that extent it us utilitarian, but moonlight we do not need. When it comes, it serves no necessity. It transforms. It falls upon the banks and the grass, separating one long blade from another; turning a drift of brown, frosted leaves from a single heap to innumerable flashing fragments; or glimmering lengthways along wet twigs as though light itself were ductile. Its long beams pour, white and sharp, between the trunks of trees, their clarity fading as they recede into the powdery, misty distance of beech woods at night. In moonlight, two acres of coarse bent grass, undulant and ankle deep, tumbled and rough as a horse's mane, appear like a bay of waves, all shadowy troughs and hollows. The growth is so thick and matted that event the wind does not move it, but it is the moonlight that seems to confer stillness upon it. We do not take moonlight for granted. It is like snow, or like the dew on a July morning. It does not reveal but changes what it covers. And its low intensity---so much lower than that of daylight---makes us conscious that it is something added to the down, to give it, for only a little time, a singular and marvelous quality that we should admire while we can, for soon it will be gone again.","author":"Richard Adams","tags":["beauty","description","lyrical"],"id":180255,"author_id":"Richard+Adams"},{"text":"When the man was disgraced and told to go away, he was allowed to ask all the animals whether any of them would come with him and share his fortunes and his life. There were only two who agreed to come entirely of their own accord, and they were the dog and the cat. And ever since then, those two have been jealous of each other, and each is for ever trying to make man choose which one he likes best. Every man prefers one or the other.","author":"Richard Adams","tags":["animals-man","cats","companions","dogs","pets"],"id":196848,"author_id":"Richard+Adams"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":35,"pages":4,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}