Top 62 John Wyndham Quotes
#1. It must be, I thought, one of the race's most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that "it can't happen here"
that one's own time and place is beyond cataclysm.
John Wyndham
#2. We all have our youthful follies, embarassing to recall
but people somehow find it hard to dismiss as a youthful folly anything that has happened to be a financial success.
John Wyndham
#3. We've got to believe that God is sane, Davie boy. We'd be lost indeed if we didn't do that.
John Wyndham
#4. There they sit, with everyone thinking no more of them than they might of a pretty odd lot of cabbages, yet half the time they're pattering and clattering away at one another. Why? What is it they patter about? That's what I want to know.' I
John Wyndham
#5. I suppose a book is still a book, even if no one but the author and his wife reads it," she said.
John Wyndham
#6. There was often a great deal of grown-up fuss that seemed disproportionate to causes.
John Wyndham
#7. The humans have a curious force they call ambition. It drives them, and, through them, it drives us. This force which keeps them active, we lack. Perhaps, in time, we machines will acquire it.
John Wyndham
#8. In temperate countries, where man had succeeded in putting most forms of nature save his own under a reasonable degree of restraint, the status of the triffid was thus made quite clear. But in the tropics, particularly in the dense forest areas, they quickly became a scourge.
John Wyndham
#9. I was hiding from them even while I moved among them.
John Wyndham
#10. They haven't God's word like they thought: God doesn't have any last word. If He did He'd be dead. But He isn't dead; and He changes and grows, like everything else that's alive
John Wyndham
#11. In my experience,' he told me, 'if you run away from a thing just because you don't like it you don't know what you find either. Now running to a thing, that's a different matter, but what would you want to run to?
John Wyndham
#12. Sham idealists: the quite large number of people who profess ideals as a form of premium for other-life insurance, and are content to lay up slavery and destitution for their descendants so long as they are enabled to produce personal copybooks of elevated views at the gate of heaven.
John Wyndham
#13. It was all conveyed by the nicest, almost indetectably refined blend of sympathy and bitchiness ...
John Wyndham
#14. Knowledge is simply a kind of fuel; it needs the motor of understanding to convert it into power.
John Wyndham
#15. But it is an inescapable conclusion that life has to be dynamic and not static. Change is bound to come one way or another.
John Wyndham
#16. As a race, we have allowed ourselves to become accustomed to the idea that the proper way to die is in bed, at a ripe age. It is a delusion. The normal end for all creatures comes suddenly.
John Wyndham
#17. Darling, whose book is this to be?"
"Ostensibly yours, my sweet"
"I see
rather like my life since I met you?"
"Yes darling
John Wyndham
#18. The dove is not a coward to fear the hawk; it is simply wise.
John Wyndham
#19. There is no conception more fallacious than the sense of cosiness implied by "Mother Nature". Each species must strive to survive, and that it will do, by every means in its power, however foul - unless the instinct to survive is weakened by conflict with another instinct.
John Wyndham
#20. If you run away from a thing just because you don't like it, you don't like what you find either.
John Wyndham
#21. You can't kill an idea the way they try to. You can keep it down awhile, but sooner or later it'll come out. Now what you've got to understand is that the wheel's not evil. Never mind what the scared men all tell you. no discovery is good or evil until men make it that way. -The Wheel, John Wtndham
John Wyndham
#22. Babies, in a world that already has far too many, remain desirable.
John Wyndham
#23. When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.
John Wyndham
#24. Nobody is going to be muddle-headed enough to confuse ignorance with innocence now - it's too important. Nor is ignorance going to be cute or funny anymore. It is going to be dangerous, very dangerous.
John Wyndham
#25. When almost half a lifetime has been spent in one conception of order, reorientation is no five-minute business.
John Wyndham
#26. Anybody who has had a great treasure has always led a precarious existence.
John Wyndham
#27. The clock is the most scared thing in a hospital
John Wyndham
#28. It seemed to me an odd view to take - rather as if one should protest that one didn't LIKE the idea of dying or being born. I preferred the notion of finding out first how it would be, and then doing what one could about the parts of it one disliked most.
John Wyndham
#29. Personal honesty takes time to assert itself - if it is ever allowed to.
John Wyndham
#30. Why should I? I've done nothing to be ashamed of. I am not ashamed - I am only beaten
John Wyndham
#31. Find a nice, self sufficient hilltop, and fortify it.
John Wyndham
#32. All my life I have been surrounded by things I'd rather not know too much about, so I have come to feel that truth made naked without purpose is really a wanton.
John Wyndham
#33. Why was I condemned to live in a democracy where every fool's vote is equal to a sensible man's?
John Wyndham
#34. All the old problems, the stale ones, both personal and general, had been solved by one mighty slash.
John Wyndham
#35. ... after all, what is a planet but an island in space?
John Wyndham
#36. Pretty nearly any stroke of fate can be made to look like a funny coincidence if you try hard enough and wait long enough.
John Wyndham
#37. But, as I understand it, your God is a universal God; He is God on all suns and all planets. Surely, then, He must have universal form? Would it not be a staggering vanity to imagine that He can manifest Himself only in the form that is appropriate to this particular, not very important planet?
John Wyndham
#38. There were some cigarettes still in the case. I lit one, and started to get into the state of mind where, though everything was still undeniably queer, I could no longer understand why I had been quite so near panic. It
John Wyndham
#39. every day it was tomorrow that I'd be able to do it, and each day it became more difficult.
John Wyndham
#40. Most people [ ... ] prefer to be coaxed or wheedled, or even driven. That way they never make a mistake: if there is one, it's always due to something or somebody else
John Wyndham
#41. "Your Tim is so unmistakably a healthy extravert type. Mens stulta in corpore sano, and all that."
"Exactly," she agreed.
John Wyndham
#42. I'm a reliable witness, you're a reliable witness, practically all God's children are reliable witnesses in their own estimation
which makes it funny how such different ideas of the same affair get about.
John Wyndham
#43. But not she. Her eternity is an article of her faith. Great wars and disasters can ebb and flow, races rise and fall, empires wither with suffering and death, but these are superficialities: she, woman, is perpetual, essential; she will go on for ever.
John Wyndham
#44. Failure.
That is a word so little to our taste that many think it a virtue to claim that they never admit it. But blind stupidity is not one of the virtues; it is a weakness ...
John Wyndham
#45. When I was quite small I would sometimes dream of a city - which was strange, because it began before I even knew what a city was.
John Wyndham
#46. Appreciating a private room. In a public ward the messy proceeding would have taken place a whole unnecessary hour
John Wyndham
#47. We are not shut away into individual cages from which we can reach out only with inadequate words.
John Wyndham
#48. It is because nature is ruthless, hideous, and cruel beyond belief that it was necessary to invent civilisation.
John Wyndham
#50. In Oppley they're smart, and in Stouch they're smarmy, but Midwich folk are just plain barmy
John Wyndham
#51. It's humiliating to be dependent, anyway, but it's still a poorer pass to have no one to depend on.
John Wyndham
#52. If you want to keep alive in the jungle, you must live as the jungle does.
John Wyndham
#53. And we danced, on the brink of an unknown future, to an echo from a vanished past.
John Wyndham
#54. The laws evolved by one particular species, for the convenience of that species, are, by their nature, concerned only with the capacities of that species - against a species with different capacities they simply become inapplicable.
John Wyndham
#55. My protective coloration isn't intended to deceive you, my sweet. It is intended to deceive me.
John Wyndham
#56. There must, I think, be a great many people who go around just longing to be baffled ...
John Wyndham
#57. Don't you sometimes wish that you had been born into the Age of Reason, instead of into the Age of the Ostensible Reason?
John Wyndham
#58. The essential quality of life is living' the essential quality of living is change; change is evolution; and we are part of it.
John Wyndham
#59. Some quotations," said Zellaby, "are greatly improved by lack of context.
John Wyndham
#60. Children have a different convention of the fearful until they have been taught the proper things to be shocked at.
John Wyndham
#61. Knowing makes all the difference ... It's the difference between just trying to keep alive, and having something to live for
John Wyndham
#62. You don't seriously suggest that thet're talking when they make that rattling noise.
John Wyndham
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