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Gerald Durrell Quotes

1925–1995 England

Gerald "Gerry" Malcolm Durrell (7 January 1925 – 30 January 1995) was a naturalist, zookeeper, author, and television presenter, most famous for founding what is now called the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust on the Channel Island of Jersey and for writing a number of books based on his animal-collecting and conservation expeditions. He was the brother of Lawrence Durrell.

England
Biologists
Naturalists
Non-fiction authors
Zoologists

Also known as: Durrell, Gerald, Gerry Durrell

Random Gerald Durrell quote

11 quotes

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

We have inherited an incredibly beautiful and complex garden, but the trouble is that we have been appallingly bad gardeners.

Two in the Bush (1966)

Right in the Heart of the African Jungle a small white man lives. Now there is one extraordinary fact about him that he is the friend of all animals.

Written by Durrell at age ten (1935)

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.

Introduction to Quest for the Kakapo (1989)

The attitude of the average person to the world they live in is completely selfish.

Two in the Bush (1966)

By and large, by asking the question "what use is it?" you are asking the animal to justify its existence without having justified your own.

Two in the Bush (1966)

We now stand so aloof from nature that we think we are God. This has always been a dangerous supposition.

Two in the Bush (1966)

His pen squeaking like a demented wren as he wrote copious notes.

Rosie Is My Relative (1968)

I have known silence: the cold earthy silence at the bottom of a newly dug well; the implacable stony silence of a deep cave; the hot, drugged midday silence when everything is hypnotised and stilled into silence by the eye of the sun; the silence when great music ends.

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

My Family and Other Animals (1956)

A sparrow can be as interesting as a bird of paradise, the behaviour of a mouse as interesting as that of a tiger. Our planet is beautifully intricate, brimming over with enigmas to be solved and riddles to be unravelled.

Gerald Durrell: The Authorised Biography (1999)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Gerald Durrell (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.