Quotes from John Wyndham

A world where a man is able to hunt his fellow man! How could he be called a man?

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 little time and place is beyond cataclysms.

In my experience,' he told me, 'if you run away from a thing just because you don't like it, you don't like what you find either. Now, running to a thing, that's a different matter, but what would you want to run to?

But when people are used to believing a thing is such-and-such a way, and the preachers want them to believe that that's the way it is; it's trouble you get, not thanks, for upsetting their ideas.

A tan?ili sme. PÃ…â"¢i ozvÄ›ne minulosti, na prahu neznámé budoucnosti.

Byla to zemÄ›, na které mohl ?lovÄ›k pracovat a vzdÄ›lávat ji a stále v ní nachdádzet budoucnost.

There was the feeling, too, that she no longer belonged – that she had become a stranger in another people's world. It had all altered so much; first changing into a place that it was difficult to understand, then growing so much more complex that one gave up trying to understand. No wonder, she thought, that the old become possessive about things; cling to objects which link them with the world that they could understand…

It never seems to have occured to you that in Nature life is growth, and preservation is an accident. ... What is preserved in the rocks or in ice is only the image of life, but you were always regarding local taboos as eternal verities, and attempting to preserve them.

he belonged. We did not, and because we did not, we had no positive—we were condemned to negatives, to not revealing ourselves, to not speaking when we would, to not using what we knew, to not being found out—to a life of perpetual deception, concealment, and lying.

For today is part of yesterday. And yesterday and today are parts of being alive. And being alive is not just an affair of the days going clonk-clonk-clonk like the pendulum of a grandfather clock: being alive is something continuous, that does not repeat; something that one should be aware of all the time, sleeping and waking...

There was nothing but myself. I hung in a timeless, spaceless, forceless void that was neither light, nor dark. I had entity, but no form; awareness, but no senses; mind, but no memory. I wondered, is this – this nothingness – my soul? And it seemed that I had wondered that always, and should go on wondering it for ever…

don't know whether that would be the zenith or nadir of decadence

You have not done badly with electricity in a hundred years. And you did well with steam in quite a short time. But all that is so cumbersome, so inefficient. And your oil engines are just a deplorable perversion - dirty, noisy, poisonous, and the cars you drive with them are barbarous, dangerous… You should be employing your resources, while you still have the, to tap and develop the use of power which is not finite. ..I sometimes

As a securely dominant species you could afford to lose touch with reality, and amuse yourselves with abstractions

asked. 'Just that mere existence is not enough. One exists by barter. One lives by giving – and taking.' 'I

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

I don't think it had ever occurred to me that man's supremacy is not primarily due to his brain, as most of the books would have one think. It is due to the brain's capacity to make use of the information conveyed to it by a narrow band of visible light rays.

Death is just the shocking end of animation; it is dissolution that is final.

There is an inability to sustain the tragic mood, a phoenix quality of the mind.

Self-pity and a sense of high tragedy are going to build nothing at all. So we had better throw them out at once, for it is builders that we must become.

In my experience,' he told me, 'if you run away from a thing just because

In my experience,' he told me, 'if you run away from a thing just because you don't like it, you don't like what you find either.

The living form defies evolution at its peril; if it does not adapt, it will be broken. The idea of completed man is the supreme vanity: the finished image is a sacrilegious myth.

It won't be just one bomb. And it was always too late, my dear. Can you imagine us tolerating any form of rival intelligence on earth, no matter how it got here? Why, we can't even tolerate anything but the narrowest differences of views within our own race.