Quotes from John Wyndham

once we had developed intelligence we weren't satisfied with the world as we found it;

What is more, nobody has ever actually proved him wrong. His chief trouble was that he usually provided such large, indigestible slabs that they stuck in all gullets—even mine, and I would class myself as a fairly wide-gulleted type.

Far away in South Kensington Mrs

It's queer,' I said 'the ways things go on, I mean. Like a seed - it looks all shriveled and finished, you'd think it was dead, but it isn't. And now a new life is starting, coming into all this . . .' Josella put her face in her hands. 'Oh God! Does it have to go on being like this? On - and on - and on - ?

Te recordaré, abuelo. Te recordaré. Nunca se me olvidará lo que me dijiste. Es sólo el miedo lo que es diabólico...

But he survived, that radio announcer. His ship and five others out of the flotilla of ten came through, a bit radioactive, but otherwise unharmed. And I understand that the first thing that happened to him when he reported back to his office after treatment was a reprimand for the use of overcolloquial language which had given offense to a number of listeners by its neglect of the Third Commandment.

Everyone starts by knowing nothing about anything, but God gives him—and even her—brains to find out with. Failure to use them is not a virtue to be praised...

I knew in my very heart that I would not be able to sustain myself for long alone.

You'd think she'd be reasonable," he muttered. "Most people aren't, even though they'd protest that they are. They 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.

It is not at all pleasant to kill a living thing, but if we pretend that we can continue life without killing we would be nothing but hypocrites.

You will have experienced, perhaps, that feeling of being relieved of a weight that you had not properly realized was there?

When she fired, he stopped, looking round wildly. He had no cover to drop to. She fired again…

Most of the villages showed empty streets, and the countryside around them was as deserted as if the whole human race and most of its animals had been spirited away. Until we came to Steeple Honey.

It is a funny thing that for most men the whitest conscience is no protection from some apprehension in the presence of police.

He's a civilized, liberal-minded man - with the usual trouble of liberal-minded men; that they think others are, too. He has an interested, inquiring mind. He has never grasped that the average mind when it encounters something new is scared, and says: "Better smash it, or suppress it, quick." Well, he's just had another demonstration of the average mind at work.

The triffids weren't slow to be interested. That uncanny sensitiveness to sounds told them something was happening. As we drove out, a couple of them were already lurching towards the entrance.

The idea of completed man is the supreme vanity

I never knew the joy, energy and ambitions which are in youth - yet I know the loss and I feel that I have been robbed of my heritage. You can dream of the future and of your children's future: we can dream of nothing but the past.

They made a mess of 1914. They came a cropper in 1940. And now they're working up for it again.

Sospecho que alguna vez oyó decir a alguien que la verdad nunca es simple y de ello dedujo que todo aquello que no es simple tiene que ser vedad a la fuerza.

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

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.

And we danced, on the brink of an unknown future, to an echo from a vanished past.

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