Doctor Dolittle in the Moon quotes

The trouble was of course attention.

Human attention is like butter: you can only spread it so thin and no thinner.

If you try to spread it over too many things at once you just don’t remember them.

They were cumbersome things to carry but we obeyed orders. No ladder was needed now to descend by.

The gentlest jump sent one flying off the insect’s back to the ground where you landed from a twenty-five-foot drop with ease and comfort.

Zip! The spring was made. And we were wading in the sands of a new world.

Finally there was the Doctor. No naturalist has ever gone afield to grasp at the secrets of a new land with the qualities John Dolittle possessed. He never claimed to know anything, beforehand, for certain.

He came to new problems with a child-like innocence which made it easy for himself to learn and the others to teach.

“By smelling he could tell if they were safe to eat”

As usual the Doctor wasted no time in preliminaries.

Most other explorers would have begun by planting a flag and singing national anthems. Not so with John Dolittle.

As soon as he was sure that we were all ready he gave the order to march. And without a word Chee-Chee and I (with Polynesia who perched herself on my shoulder) fell in behind him and started off.

some as small as a walnut. But, starving as we were, we just dived in and ate and ate and ate. Water there was too, gathered in the shells of enormous nuts and odd vessels made from twisted leaves.

Never has a breakfast tasted so marvelous as did that one of fruits which I could not name.

“Some of the fruits were as big as a trunk”

This did not apply so much where the land was hilly or mountainous; but on the level, or the nearly level, it made a very striking difference.

The roundness of this world was much more easily felt and understood than was that of the world we had left.

On this plateau, for example, you could only see seven or eight miles, it seemed, over the level before the curve cut off your vision.

Again I was thankful that I had company on that expedition. It was certainly a most curious and extraordinary experience. None of us spoke very much but when we did it seemed that all of us had been thinking the same things.

The woods grew more and more mysterious, and more and more alive, as we went onward towards the other side of the Moon, the side that earthly Man had never seen before.

For one thing, the strange music seemed to increase; and for another, there was more movement in the limbs of the trees.

All of the forest was not gloomy however. Much of it was unbelievably beautiful.

Acres of woods there were which presented nothing but a gigantic sea of many-colored blossoms, colors that seemed like something out of a dream, indescribable, yet clear in one’s memory as a definite picture of something seen.

The Doctor as we went forward spoke very little; when he did it was almost always on the same subject: “the absence of decay,” as he put it.

and this curious thing we had met with interested him a great deal. After several expeditions we found patches of the jungle where we were able to see and hear the tree music working at its best.

There was no doubt about it at all: The trees were making the sounds and they were doing it deliberately.

In the way that an Æolian harp works when set in the wind at the right angle, the trees moved their branches to meet the wind so that certain notes would be given out.

He was a very excellent mathematician, was the Doctor. And one afternoon he sat down with a note book and the Nautical Almanac and worked out tables which should tell him from the stars where he was and in what direction he was going.

It was curious, that strange sense of comfort we drew from the stars. They, the heavenly bodies which from the Earth seemed the remotest, most distant, unattainable and strangest of objects, here suddenly became friendly; because, I suppose, they were the only things that really stayed the same.

The stars, as we saw them from the Moon, were precisely as the stars we had seen from the Earth. The fact that they were nearly all countless billions of miles away made no difference.

This we proceeded to do but did not get very far with it before the Doctor suddenly had qualms of conscience.

Trees that could talk could, one would suppose, also feel.

The thought was dreadful. We hadn’t even the courage to ask the trees about it—yet. So we fell back upon gathering fallen twigs and small branches.

Of course on a globe larger than that of the Moon we could never have done as well as we did.

When you come to think of it, one man, a boy, a monkey and a parrot, as a staff for the exploration of a whole world, makes the expedition sound, to say the least, absurd.

We did not realize, any of us, when we started out from our first landing that we were going to make a circular trip of the Moon’s globe. It just worked out that way.

I shall never forget our first meeting with the Vanity Lilies, as the Doctor later came to call them.

Great gaudy blooms they were, on long slender stems that swayed and moved in groups like people whispering and gossiping at a party.

When we came in sight of them for the first time, they were more or less motionless. But as we approached, the movement among them increased as though they were disturbed by, or interested in, our coming.

After a short and silent supper, we lay down and pulled the covers over us. The music of the forest grew louder as darkness increased.

It seemed almost as though the whole vegetable world was remarking on these visitors who had invaded their home.

And then above the music of the woods we’d hear the drone of flying, while we dropped off to sleep. Some of the giant insects were hovering near, as usual, to keep an eye on these creatures from another world.

The Lilies—“Good gracious, no! What’s the use of all this running about?

After all, there’s no place like home—provided it’s a good one.

It’s a pleasant life we lead—and very safe. The folks who rush around are always having accidents, breaking legs and so forth. Those troubles can’t happen to us. We sit still and watch the world go by.

Still, the way those flowers feel light, can tell colors, movement, and form, makes it look very much as though they had found a way of seeing—even if they haven’t got eyes. . . . Humph!

Yes, one might quite possibly see with other things besides eyes.

”

“Oh, well,” said the Doctor, “come, come! Don’t let’s bother about the stiles till we reach them. After all we don’t know for certain that these—er—whoever it is—are definitely unfriendly to us. They may have reasons of their own for working slowly.

You must remember that we are just as strange and outlandish to them as they and their whole world are to us.

We mustn’t let any idea of that kind become a nightmare. We have only been here, let’s see, not much over two weeks. It is a pleasant land and there is lots to be learned. The Vegetable Kingdom is clearly well disposed towards us.

“Dear, dear,” the Doctor muttered as Chee-Chee ended. “The first religious strife—the first of so many. What a pity!—

Just as though it mattered to any one what his neighbor believed so long as he himself led a sincere and useful life and was happy!

”

“You see, Stubbins,” said the Doctor, “the great size of almost all life here, the development of intelligence in plant forms, and much more besides, could not possibly have come about if this regulation had not been in force.

Our world could learn a lot from the Moon, Stubbins—the Moon, its own child whom it presumes to despise!

We have no balancing or real protection of life. With us it is, and always has been, ‘dog eat dog.’ ”

The dusk had now settled down over the strange assembly.

Starlight glowed weirdly in the eyes of the moths and birds that stood about us, like a lamp’s flame reflected in the eyes of a cat.

As I made another effort to stifle my silly titters I saw John Dolittle, the size of his figure looking perfectly absurd in comparison with the Moon Man’s, rise to meet the giant who had come to visit us.

immense beetles suffering from an affliction of the eyes; grasshoppers as tall as a three-storey house with crude bandages on their gawky joints; enormous birds with a wing held painfully in an odd position.

The Doctor’s home had become once more a clinic; and all the halt and lame of Moon Society had gathered at his door.

The great man, when I finally roused him, swallowed two or three gulps of melon, washed them down with a draft of honey and water, took off his coat and set to work.