John Wyndham Quotes

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

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

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

...after all, what is a planet but an island in space?

It's humiliating to be dependent, anyway, but it's still a poorer pass to have no one to depend on.

Anybody who has had a great treasure has always led a precarious existence.

The simple rely on a bolstering mass of maxim and precept, so do the timid, so do the mentally lazy – and so do all of us, more than we imagine.

Some quotations," said Zellaby, "are greatly improved by lack of context.

Why was I condemned to live in a democracy where every fool's vote is equal to a sensible man's?

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.

There was often a great deal of grown-up fuss that seemed disproportionate to causes.

Why should I? I've done nothing to be ashamed of. I am not ashamed - I am only beaten

If you want to keep alive in the jungle, you must live as the jungle does.

If you run away from a thing just because you don't like it, you don't like what you find either.

Find a nice, self sufficient hilltop, and fortify it.

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

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.

Knowing makes all the difference... It's the difference between just trying to keep alive, and having something to live for

Children have a different convention of the fearful until they have been taught the proper things to be shocked at.

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.

The clock is the most sacred thing in a hospital.

…after all, what is a planet but an island in space?

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

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

The way I came to miss the end of the world – well, the end of the world I had known for close on thirty years – was sheer accident: like a lot of survival, when you come to think of it.

We've got to believe that God is sane, Davie boy. We'd be lost indeed if we didn't do that.

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