Top 50 Gerald Durrell Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “When man continues to destroy nature, he saws the very branch on which he sits since the rational protection of nature is at the same time the protection of mankind.”

— Gerald Durrell

2. “Erosion, desertification, and pollution have become our lot. It is a weird form of suicide, for we are bleeding our planet to death.”

— Gerald Durrell

3. “A house is not a home until it has a dog.”

— Gerald Durrell

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

— Gerald Durrell

5. “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

6. “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

7. “I believe that all children should be surrounded by books and animals.”

— Gerald Durrell

8. “The uncivilized behavior of some human beings in a zoo has to be seen to be believed.”

— Gerald Durrell

9. “By neglecting our garden, we are storing up for ourselves, in the not very distant future, a world catastrophe as bad as any atomic war, and we are doing it with all the bland complacency of an idiot child chopping up a Rembrandt with a pair of scissors.”

— Gerald Durrell

10. “Each day had a tranquility a timelessness about it so that you wished it would never end. But then the dark skin of the night would peel off and there would be a fresh day waiting for us glossy and colorful as a child’s transfer and with the same tinge of unreality.”

— Gerald Durrell

11. “Zoos should concentrate more on the preservation side of things.”

— Gerald Durrell

12. “Animals generally return the love you lavish on them by a swift bite in passing-not unlike friends and wives.”

— Gerald Durrell

13. “The most wonderful, beautiful things in life are the simple things which we have all forgotten.”

— Gerald Durrell

14. “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

15. “All over the world the wildlife that I write about is in grave danger. It is being exterminated by what we call the progress of civilization.”

— Gerald Durrell

16. “Roses dropped petals that seemed as big and smooth as saucers, flame red, moon and white, glossy, and unwrinkled.”

— Gerald Durrell

17. “I can’t be expected to produce deathless prose in an atmosphere of gloom and eucalyptus.”

— Gerald Durrell

18. “Aspirin is so good for roses, brandy for sweet peas, and a squeeze of lemon-juice for the fleshy flowers, like begonias.”

— Gerald Durrell

19. “The sea lifted smooth blue muscles of wave as it stirred in the dawn-light, and the foam of our wake spread gently behind us like a white peacock’s tail, glinting with bubbles.”

— Gerald Durrell

20. “If some people want to believe in Jesus, or Mohammed, or Buddha, or their ancestors, who is to say which is right and which wrong? It seems to me that most of the religions in the world are too dogmatic. They preach the ‘live and let live’ philosophy, but rarely do they practise it.”

— Gerald Durrell

21. “As I watched the pulsing fire among the trees and heard the beat of the drum merge and tremble with the voices, forming an intricate pattern of sound, I knew that someday I would have to return or be haunted forever by the beauty and mystery that is Africa.”

— Gerald Durrell

22. “Here in Corfu,’ said Theodore, his eyes twinkling with pride, ’anything can happen.”

— Gerald Durrell

23. “I do wish you wouldn’t argue with me when I’m knitting.”

— Gerald Durrell

24. “Larry was designed by Providence to go through life like a small, blond firework, exploding ideas in other people’s minds, and then curling up with catlike unctuousness and refusing to take any blame for the consequences.”

— Gerald Durrell

25. “The owls appeared now, drifting from tree to tree as silently as flakes of soot, hooting in astonishment as the moon rose higher and higher, turning to pink, then gold, and finally riding in a nest of stars, like a silver bubble.”

— Gerald Durrell

26. “Larry was always full of ideas about things of which he had no experience.”

— Gerald Durrell

27. “She lifted her hand again and waved. It seemed to me, in the gloom, that the flowers had moved closer to her, had crowded eagerly about her bed, as though waiting for her to tell them something. A ravaged old queen, lying in state, surrounded by her whispering court of flowers.”

— Gerald Durrell

28. “Overflowing with the milk of human kindness, the family had invited everyone they could think of, including people they cordially disliked.”

— Gerald Durrell

29. “We stared at the odd garment and wondered what it was for. ‘What is it?’ asked Larry at length. ‘It’s a bathing costume, of course,’ said Mother. ‘What on earth did you think it was?’ ‘It looks like a badly skinned whale,’ said Larry, peering at it closely.”

— Gerald Durrell

30. “It has always amazed me that these people who are trying to learn and understand the world around us before it is bulldozed out of existence, have to work on piteously low salaries or on minuscule and precarious grants, while they do one of the most important jobs in the world. For it is only by learning how the planet works that we will see what we are doing wrong and have a chance to save it and ourselves as well.”

— Gerald Durrell

31. “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

32. “Ask the average person his views on snakes and he will, within the space of ten minutes, talk more nonsense than a brace of politicians.”

— Gerald Durrell

33. “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

34. “But throughout my life I have rarely if ever achieved what I wanted by tackling it in a logical fashion.”

— Gerald Durrell

35. “Tea would arrive, the cakes squatting on cushions of cream, toast in a melting shawl of butter, cups agleam and a faint wisp of steam rising from the teapot shawl.”

— Gerald Durrell

36. “It was no half-hearted spring, this: the whole island vibrated with it as though a great, ringing chord had been struck. Everyone and everything heard it and responded.”

— Gerald Durrell

37. “So I went instead and tasted Taki’s new white wine. Spiridion! what a wine... like the blood of a dragon and smooth as a fish...”

— Gerald Durrell

38. “Well,” said Larry with dignity, “it may give you pleasure to be woken at half-past three in the morning by a pigeon who seems intent on pushing his rectum into your eye...”

— Gerald Durrell

39. “What fools we are, eh? What fools, sitting here in the sun, singing. And of love, too! I am too old for it and you are too young, and yet we waste our time singing about it. Ah, well, let’s have a glass of wine, eh?”

— Gerald Durrell

40. “No one but a murderer would have thought of giving Gerry that albatross.”

— Gerald Durrell

41. “They were maps that lived, maps that one could study, frown over, and add to; maps, in short, that really meant something.”

— Gerald Durrell

42. “It was due to this attitude of pomposity that he set the villa on fire. Leslie.”

— Gerald Durrell

43. “Sometimes the fresh load of guests would turn up before we had got rid of the previous group, and the chaos was indescribable; the house and garden would be dotted with poets, authors, artists, and playwrights arguing, painting, drinking, typing, and composing. Far from being the ordinary, charming people that Larry had promised, they all turned out to be the most extraordinary eccentrics who were so highbrow that they had difficulty in understanding one another.”

— Gerald Durrell

44. “It was my birthday. I lay there savouring the feeling of having a whole day to myself when people would give me presents and the family would be forced to accede to any reasonable requests.”

— Gerald Durrell

45. “At last, after much effort, there came a prolonged belch from the mud and Larry shot to the surface and we hauled him up the bank. He stood there, covered with the black and stinking slush, looking like a chocolate statue that has come in contact with a blast furnace; he appeared to be melting as we watched.”

— Gerald Durrell

46. “Right in the Hart of the Africn Jungel a small wite man lives. Now there is one xtrordenry fackt about him that he is the frind of all animals.”

— Gerald Durrell

47. “Oh, Mother, don’t be so old-fashioned,’ Margo said impatiently. ‘After all, you only die once.’ This remark was as baffling as it was true, and successfully silenced Mother.”

— Gerald Durrell

48. “People who are car-sick are never sea-sick,’ explained Mother.”

— Gerald Durrell

49. “The villa that Spiro had found was shaped not unlike a brick and was a bright crushed-strawberry pink with green shutters. It crouched in a cathedral-like grove of olives that sloped down the hillside to the sea, and it was surrounded by a pocket-handkerchief-size garden, the flower-beds laid out with a geometrical accuracy so dear to the Victorians, and the whole thing guarded by a tall, thick hedge of fuchsias that rustled mysteriously with birds.”

— Gerald Durrell

50. “I’m making some scones,’ said Mother, and sighs of satisfaction ran round the table, for Mother’s scones, wearing cloaks of home-made strawberry jam, butter, and cream, were a delicacy all of us adored.”

— Gerald Durrell