Quotes from John Wyndham

Knowledge is simply a kind of fuel; it needs the motor of understanding to convert it into power.

The essential quality of life is living' the essential quality of living is change; change is evolution; and we are part of it.

When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.

It is because nature is ruthless, hideous, and cruel beyond belief that it was necessary to invent civilisation.

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.

Darling, whose book is this to be?" "Ostensibly yours, my sweet" "I see -- rather like my life since I met you?" "Yes darling

The clock is the most sacred thing in a hospital

You know, one of the most shocking things about it is to realize how easily we have lost a world that seemed so safe and certain." She was quite right. It was that simplicity that seemed somehow to be the nucleus of the shock. From very familiarity one forgets all the forces which keep the balance, and thinks of security as normal. It is not.

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.

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.

Half the political intelligentsia who talk to a working audience don't get the value of their stuff across—not so much because they're over their audience's heads, as because half the chaps are listening to the voice and not to the words, so they knock a big discount off what they do hear because it's all a bit fancy, and not like ordinary, normal talk.

You don't seriously suggest that thet're talking when they make that rattling noise.

It was all conveyed by the nicest, almost indetectably refined blend of sympathy and bitchiness...

Personal honesty takes time to assert itself - if it is ever allowed to.

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?

When almost half a lifetime has been spent in one conception of order, reorientation is no five-minute business.

Your work is to survive. Neither his kind, nor his kind of thinking will survive long. They are the crown of creation, they are ambition fulfilled—they have nowhere more to go. But life is change, that is how it differs from the rocks, change is its very nature. Who, then, were the recent lords of creation, that they should expect to remain unchanged?

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.

To deprive a gregarious creature of companionship is to maim it, to outrage its nature. The prisoner and the cenobite are aware that the herd exists beyond their exile; they are an aspect of it. But when the herd no longer exists, there is, for the herd creature, no longer entity, a part of no whole; a freak without a place. If he cannot hold on to his reason, then he is lost indeed; most utterly, most fearfully lost, so that he becomes no more than the twitch in the limb of a corpse.

I suppose a book is still a book, even if no one but the author and his wife reads it," she said.

There must, I think, be a great many people who go around just longing to be baffled...

My protective coloration isn't intended to deceive you, my sweet. It is intended to deceive me.

The Old People brought down Tribulation, and were broken into fragments by it. Your father and his kind are a part of those fragments. They have become history without being aware of it. They are determined still that there is a final form to defend: soon they will attain the stability they strive for, in the only form it is granted—a place among the fossils.

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.