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Animals don't behave like men...If they have to fight, they fight; and if they have to kill they kill. But they don't sit down and set their wits to work to devise ways of spoiling other creatures' lives and hurting them. They have dignity and animality.

— Richard Adams Watership Down (1972)

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More quotes by Richard Adams

There is nothing that cuts you down to size like coming to some strange and marvelous place where no one even stops to notice that you stare about you.

Watership Down (1972)

To come to the end of a time of anxiety and fear! To feel the cloud that hung over us lift and disperse—the cloud that dulled the heart and made happiness no more than a memory! This at least is one joy that must have been known by almost every living creature.

Watership Down (1972)

Dangerous thing, a name. Someone might catch hold of you by it, mightn't they?

The Plague Dogs (1977)

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

Watership Down (1972)

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.

Watership Down (1972)

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Richard Adams (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.