there came from the olive groves outside the fuchsia hedge the incessant shimmering cries of the cicadas. If the curious, blurring heat haze produced… - Gerald Durrell

We have inherited an incredibly beautiful and complex garden, but the trouble is that we have been appallingly bad gardeners. We have not bothered to acquaint ourselves with the simplest principles of gardening. 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. We go on, year after year, all over the world, creating dust bowls and erosion, cutting down forests and overgrazing our grasslands, polluting one of our most vital commodities — water — with industrial filth and all the time we are breeding with the ferocity of the Brown Rat, and wondering why there is not enough food to go round. We now stand so aloof from nature that we think we are God. This has always been a dangerous supposition.

— Estos unicornios son todos iguales — comentó Loro con tristeza — ­, más vanidosos que un pavo. Dales un espejo, o simplemente cualquier cosa en la que puedan verse reflejados, y se quedan como hipnotizados. — Pero éste no es más que un niño — dijó Penélope — , y hay que reconocer que es realmente guapo.

In conservation, the motto should always be 'never say die'.