My heart has joined the Thousand, for my friend stopped running today.

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...

Bluebell had been saying that he knew the men hated us for raiding their crops and gardens, and Toadflax answered, ‘That wasn’t why they destroyed the warren. It was just because we were in their...

How do they find out with the experiments?”…one way they can find out a whole lot is to make an animal ill and then try different ways to make it better until they find one...

There is not a day or night but a doe offers her life for her kittens, or some honest captain of Owsla his life for his Chief Rabbit’s. Sometimes it is taken, sometimes it is...

Here is a boy who was waiting to be punished. But then, unexpectedly,he ,nds that his fault has been overlooked or forgiven and at once the worldreappears in brilliant colors, full of delightful prospects. Here...

A foraging wild creature, intent above all upon survival, is as strong as the grass.

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.

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...

Most of them had not understood Blackberry’s discovery of the raft and at once forgot it.

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 thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal; but ideas are immortal.

They want to be natural, the anti-social little beasts. They just don’t realize that everyone’s good depends on everyone’s cooperation.

Literal religion is full of pitfalls.

We are all human and fall short of where we need to be. We must never stop trying to be the best we can be.

At that instant a dazzling claw of lightning streaked down the length of the sky. The hedge and the distant trees seemed to leap forward in the brilliance of the flash. Immediately upon it came...

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...

Our children’s children will hear a good story.

Human beings say, “It never rains but it pours.” This is not very apt, for it frequently does rain without pouring. The rabbits’ proverb is better expressed. They say, “One cloud feels lonely”: and indeed...

They’re all so much afraid of the Council that they’re not afraid of anything else.

I certainly think that 10 to 20 years from now, clearly the majority of veterinarians will be women.

Hazel, like nearly all wild animals, was unaccustomed to look up at the sky. What he thought of as the sky was the horizon, usually broken by trees and hedges.

At that moment, in the sunset on Watership Down, there was offered to General Woundwort the opportunity to show whether he was really the leader of vision and genius which he believed himself to be,...

The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief, which is at the heart of all popular religion, that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon...

Many human beings say that they enjoy the winter, but what they really enjoy is feeling proof against it.

I dislike this whole business of experimentation on animals, unless there’s some very good and altogether exceptional reason to this very case. The thing that gets me is that it’s not possible for the animals...

A thing can be true and still be desperate folly, Hazel.

He fought because he actually felt safer fighting than running.

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...

Animals don’t behave like men,’ he said. ‘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...

No, no- the sky will grow dark, cold rain will fall and all trace of the right way will be blotted out. You will be all alone. And still you will have to go on....