Hugh Lofting Quotes

“Then John Dolittle got a fine, big pair of green spectacles; and the plow-horse stopped going blind in one eye and could see as well as ever. And soon it became a common sight to see farm-animals wearing glasses in the country round Puddleby; and a blind horse was a thing unknown.”

″‘I felt sure there was twopence left,’ said the Doctor. ‘There was,’ said the owl. ‘But you spent it on a rattle for that badger’s baby when he was teething.‘”

″‘But I like animals better than the best people,’ said the Doctor.”

″‘This is interesting-very interesting-something quite new. Give me the Bird’s A.B.C first-slowly now.’ So that was the way the Doctor came to know that animals had a language of their own and could talk to one another.”

″‘What I am wondering,’ said the Doctor, ‘is where we are going to get another boat to go home in...Oh well, perhaps we’ll find one lying about on the beach that nobody is using.‘”

“He was very fond of animals and kept many kinds of pets. Besides the gold-fish in the pond at the bottom of his garden, he had rabbits in the pantry, white mice in his piano, a squirrel in the linen closet and a hedgehog in the cellar.”

“Many curious sights and happenings they saw in this wandering life; but they all seemed quite ordinary after the great things they had seen and done in foreign lands.″

″‘Money,’ he said, ‘is a terrible nuisance. But it’s nice not to have to worry.‘”

″‘Tar; Spanish onions; kerosene oil; wet raincoats; crushed laurel-leaves; rubber burning; lace-curtains being washed--No, my mistake, lace-curtains hanging out to dry; and foxes--hundreds of ‘em--cubs; and--’ ‘Can you really smell all those different things in this one wind?’ asked the Doctor. ‘Why, of course!’ said Jip.”

“But far away in Africa, where the monkeys chattered in the palm-trees before they went to bed under the big yellow moon, they would say to one another, ‘I wonder what The Good Man’s doing now-over there, in the Land of White Men! Do you think he will ever come back?’ And Polynesia would squeak out from the vines, ‘I think he will- I guess he will- I hope he will!‘”

“John, how can you expect sick people to come and see you when you keep all these animals in the house? It’s a fine doctor would have his parlor full of hedgehogs and mice!”

″‘...animals don’t always speak with their mouths,’ said the parrot in a high voice, raising her eyebrows. ‘They talk with their ears, with their feet, with their tails- with everything.‘”