“My childhood in Corfu shaped my life. If I had the craft of Merlin, I would give every child the gift of my childhood.”
Gerald Durrell“Until we consider animal life to be worthy of the consideration and reverence we bestow upon old books and pictures and historic monuments, there will always be the animal refugee living a precarious life on the edge of extermination, dependent for existence on the charity of a few human beings.”
Gerald Durrell“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.”
Gerald Durrell“I can't be expected to produce deathless prose in an atmosphere of gloom and eucalyptus.”
Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals“The gold and scarlet leaves that littered the countryside in great drifts whispered and chuckled among themselves, or took experimental runs from place to place, rolling like coloured hoops among the trees. It was as if they were practising something, preparing for something, and they would discuss it excitedly in rustly voices as they crowded round the tree trunks.”
Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals“In conservation, the motto should always be 'never say die'.”
Gerald Durrell, The Aye-Aye and I“Theodore had an apparently inexhaustible fund of knowledge about everything, but he imparted this knowledge with a sort of meticulous diffidence that made you feel he was not so much teaching you something new, as reminding you of something which you were already aware of, but which had, for some reason or other, slipped your mind.”
Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals“Overflowing with the milk of human kindness, the family had invited everyone they could think of, including people they cordially disliked.”
Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals“She would seize every opportunity to dive into the bathroom, in a swirl of white towels, and once in there she was as hard to dislodge as a limpet from a rock.”
Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals“Gradually the magic of the island [Corfu] settled over us as gently and clingingly as pollen.”
Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals“My childhood in Corfu shaped my life. If I had the craft of Merlin, I would give every child the gift of my childhood.”
Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals