All About Animals discussion

Have you read any books about animals and had a favorite quote? List it here.

The Ancient Mariner is a very long poem about marine animals - an albatross and the supposedly loathesome creatures, like water snakes are pivotal to the plot of the poem. My favaourite verse is :

"The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew
The furrow followed free
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea."

Inge will understand how that so carries the spirit of wonderful trade winds sailing.

But as its not really about animals I'll find a quote from that poem that is. Here we go:

The mariner is speaking about the "slimy things that crawl with legs upon the slimy sea. He had (until this moment) loathed them.
But suddenly he says this:

"Oh happy living things!
No tongue, their beauty might declare.
A spring of love gushed from my heart
And I blessed the unaware."

That caused the spell to start to break and in the next verse this is what happens:

"The self-same moment I could pray
And from my neck so free
The albatross fell off and sank
Like lead into the sea."

Tui wrote: "The Ancient Mariner is a very long poem about marine animals - an albatross and the supposedly loathesome creatures, like water snakes are pivotal to the plot of the poem. My favaourite verse is :
..."

My favorite stanza from that poem is this:
"Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean."


And there are MANY quotes in Life of Pi, which I might add here later =)

Those quotes above are wonderful (and, Tui, I can still feel the breeze around my ears).

I would have to come back to James Herriott’s quote (which he took from somewhere too), and I then borrowed for Pasha’s book:

All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.

Inge wrote: "
All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all. ..."

Love that!

"It's true, isn't it, that each of us has two hearts? The secret heart, curled behind like a fist, living gnarled and shrunken beneath the plain, open one we use every day."
— Carolyn Parkhurst, The Dogs of Babel

Inge wrote: "Those quotes above are wonderful (and, Tui, I can still feel the breeze around my ears).

I would have to come back to James Herriott’s quote (which he took from somewhere too), and I then borrowed..."

I love This one too!

"Dogs aren't dangerous!"
The last words of General Woundwort in Watership Down.

And for any lovers of the wild, read The Call of the Wild by Robert Service. A poem I whose beauty I guarantee will have the hairs on the back of your neck standing up.