Watership Down Quotes

“A thing can be true and still be desperate folly, Hazel.”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down

“The rabbits mingled naturally. They did not talk for talking's sake, in the artificial manner that human beings - and sometimes even their dogs and cats - do. But this did not mean that they were not communicating; merely that they were not communicating by talking.”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down

“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.”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down

“I've always said that Watership Down is not a book for children. I say: it's a book, and anyone who wants to read it can read it.”
― Richard Adams

“It was as easy as breathing to go and have tea near the place where Jane Austen had so wittily scribbled and so painfully died. One of the things that causes some critics to marvel at Miss Austen is the laconic way in which, as a daughter of the epoch that saw the Napoleonic Wars, she contrives like a Greek dramatist to keep it off the stage while she concentrates on the human factor. I think this comes close to affectation on the part of some of her admirers. Captain Frederick Wentworth in Persuasion, for example, is partly of interest to the female sex because of the 'prize' loot he has extracted from his encounters with Bonaparte's navy. Still, as one born after Hiroshima I can testify that a small Hampshire township, however large the number of names of the fallen on its village-green war memorial, is more than a world away from any unpleasantness on the European mainland or the high or narrow seas that lie between. (I used to love the detail that Hampshire's 'New Forest' is so called because it was only planted for the hunt in the late eleventh century.) I remember watching with my father and brother through the fence of Stanstead House, the Sussex mansion of the Earl of Bessborough, one evening in the early 1960s, and seeing an immense golden meadow carpeted entirely by grazing rabbits. I'll never keep that quiet, or be that still, again.

This was around the time of countrywide protest against the introduction of a horrible laboratory-confected disease, named 'myxomatosis,' into the warrens of old England to keep down the number of nibbling rodents. Richard Adams's lapine masterpiece Watership Down is the remarkable work that it is, not merely because it evokes the world of hedgerows and chalk-downs and streams and spinneys better than anything since The Wind in the Willows, but because it is only really possible to imagine gassing and massacre and organized cruelty on this ancient and green and gently rounded landscape if it is organized and carried out against herbivores.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“The primroses were over.”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down

“Your storm, Thlayli-rah. Use it.”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down

“You needn't worry about them," said his companion. "They'll be alright - and thousands like them. If you'll come along, I'll show you what I mean.”
― Richard Adams

“Bluebell: Please, sir, I'm only a little [car] and I've left all my petrol on the grass. So if you don't mind eating the grass, sir, while I give this lady a ride-

Hazel: Bluebell, shut up!”
― Richard Adams

“Racing through the ocher light, Bigwig was impelled by a frenzy of tension and energy. He did not feel the wound in his shoulder. The storm was his own. The storm would defeat Efrafa.”
― Richard Adams

“He reached the top of the bank in a single, powerful leap. Hazel followed; and together they slipped away, running easily down through the wood, where the first primroses were beginning to bloom.”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down

“This reminds me: Are you going to eat the placenta?” Renée asked Harper. “I understand that’s a thing now. We stocked a pregnancy guide at the bookstore with a whole chapter of placenta recipes in the back. Omelets and pasta sauces and so on.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Harper said. “Dining on the placenta smacks of cannibalism, and I was hoping for a more dignified apocalypse.”
“Rabbit mothers eat their own babies,” the Mazz said. “I found that out reading Watership Down. Apparently the mamas chow on their newborns all the time. Pop them down just like little meat Skittles.”
― Joe Hill, The Fireman

“For some reason the past—any of our pasts—was solidly off-limits. They were like the creepy rabbits in Watership Down who won't answer any questions beginning with "Where.”
― Tana French, The Likeness

“Would that the dead were not dead! But there is grass that must be eaten, pellets that must be chewed, (...) 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.”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down

“Exactly. Don't you see, they'd altered what rabbits do naturally because they taught they could do better? And if they altered their ways, so can we if we like. You say buck rabbits don't dig. Nor they do. But they could, if they wanted to. Suppose we had deep, comfortable burrows to sleep in? To be out of bad weather and underground at night? Then we would be safe. And there is nothing to stop us having them, except that buck rabbits won't dig. Not can't -- won't.' - Blackberry”
― Richard Adams

“If we ever meet again Hazel-rah", said Dandelion, as he took cover in the grass verge, "we ought to have the makings of the best story ever.”
― Richard Adams