Quotes from John Wyndham

Your Tim is so unmistakably a healthy extravert type. Mens stulta in corpore sano, and all that." "Exactly," she agreed.

Babies, in a world that already has far too many, remain desirable.

When people live their lives by their beliefs objective reality is almost irrelevant. 'That's

Pretty nearly any stroke of fate can be made to look like a funny coincidence if you try hard enough and wait long enough.

The alternative is the sword over your heads,' he said. 'I know,' I agreed unhappily. 'But that isn't the way. A sword inside us would be worse.

What we do with the product of genius is first of all ram it down to the lowest common denominator and then multiply it by the vulgarest possible fraction. -from "Pawley's Peepholes

La vida, en todas sus manifestaciones, es conflicto

every day it was tomorrow that I'd be able to do it, and each day it became more difficult.

In loyalty to their kind they cannot tolerate our rise; in loyalty to our kind, we cannot tolerate their obstruction. 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

Soldiering'll soon be nothing but wizards and wires.

novelty is a wonderfully short-lived thing.

Among the other papers I bought at London Airport was the current number of The Beholder. Thought it is, I am aware, not without its merits and even well thought of in some circles, it leaves me with an abiding sense that it is more given to expressing its first prejudices than its second thoughts. Perhaps if it were to go to press a day later....

They persisted in the face of discouragement until they gained the kind of acceptance accorded to the inevitable.

appreciating a private room. In a public ward the messy proceeding would have taken place a whole unnecessary hour

Don't you sometimes wish that you had been born into the Age of Reason, instead of into the Age of the Ostensible Reason?

Like all parents she is dichotomous, what she really wants is a child genius who is perfectly normal.

In the end, defeat, and the cold, must come. First to the system, then the galaxy, then the universe, and the rest will be silence. Not to admit that is a fools vanity.' She paused. ' Yet one grows flowers because they are lovely - not because one wishes them to live forever.

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.

We are not shut away into individual cages from which we can reach out only with inadequate words.

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

Something entirely unexpected happened to Bert. Yesterday he had seen her as a child grown up, today it was different. There was a pain in his chest and a hammering, the skin on his temples felt oddly tight, his hand trembled so that he almost dropped the bar he was holding. He leaned back against the wheel, staring at her but unable to speak. A long time seemed to pass before he could say anything, and the words sounded clumsy in his own ears. What

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...

The leader does the planning, but he's wise enough not to say so. As the changes become necessary, he slips them in as a concession – temporary, of course – to circumstances, but if he's good, he's slipping in the right bits for the ultimate shape.

I'm not bigoted enough to twist facts to suit what I've been taught.