Robert C. O'Brien Quotes

“Although she was a widow (her husband had died only the preceding summer), Mrs. Frisby was able, through luck and hard work, to keep her family—there were four of them—happy and well fed.”

“If you need me again, just ask. After all, if it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t be here to ask.”

“Mrs. Frisby, it seems that you have more than repaid us for the help we gave you in moving your house. Just as your husband did once, you have saved us from a disaster: death or capture—we do not yet know which.”

“I say, why start from nothing if you can start with everything? We’ve already got a civilization.”

“I, who had always run where I wanted, could go three hops forward, three hops back again. And that was all.”

“Birdbrain, thought Mrs. Frisby, and then recalled what her husband used to say: The size of the brain is no measure of its capacity. And well she might recall it, for the crow’s head was double the size of her own.”

“There were two sets of encyclopedias that had sections on rats. From them we learned that we were about the most hated animals on earth, except maybe snakes and germs. That seemed strange to us, and unjust. Especially when we learned that some of our close cousins—squirrels, for instance, and rabbits—were well liked. But people think we spread diseases, and I suppose possibly we do, though never intentionally, and surely we never spread as many diseases as people themselves do.”

“But why? Why move? We’ve got a better place to live right now. We’ve got all the food we want. We’ve got electricity, and lights, and running water. I can’t understand why everybody talks about changing things.”

“We’re just living on the edge of somebody else’s [civilization], like fleas on a dog’s back. If the dog drowns, the fleas drown, too.”

“You can see why this would have been a dreadful thing for Jonathan to have to tell you. You never had the injections. That meant that while he stayed young, you would grow older, and older, and finally die. He loved you, and he could hardly stand that thought. Yet if it was distressing to him — he thought — how much more painful it would be to you! That is what he could not bring himself to tell you.”

″‘If the ants can do it, Nicodemus says, if the bees can do it, so can we.’ ‘Do what?’ ‘Why, live without stealing, of course. That’s the whole idea. That’s the Plan.‘”