“You can’t just wake up one day
and decide to be an elephant, Alfred.
The world doesn’t work like that.
There are rules, Alfred.
And you want to stomp all over them.
Get over yourself.”
“In the great forest a little elephant is born. His name is Babar. His mother loves him very much. She rocks him to sleep with her trunk while singing softly to him.”
“It’s an elephant-bird!! And it should be, it should be, it SHOULD be like that! Because Horton was faithful! He sat and he sat! He meant what he said and he said what he meant... and they sent him home happy, one hundred per cent!
“Horton was lonely. He wanted to play. But he sat on the egg and continued to say: ‘I meant what I said, I said what I meant, an elephant is faithful one hundred per cent!”
“Did he run? He did not! HORTON STAYED ON THAT NEST! He held his head high and threw out his chest and looked at the hunters as much as to say: ‘shoot if you must but I won’t run away!’ ”
“Uncle is an elephant. He’s immensely rich, and he’s a B.A. He dresses well, generally, in a purple dressing gown, and often rides on a traction engine, which he prefers to a car.”
“have I followed my lord, the elephant, but never have I heard that any child of man had seen what this child has seen. By all the Gods of the Hills, it is—what can we say?”