John Wyndham

"The world has so multiplied the causes of fear that no one is left entirely unafraid."

"There are, of course, risks. In fact, there are three distinct kinds of risk: the known ones which we can and shall prepare against; the known ones which we must trust to luck to avoid; and the entirely unknown."

"Poor baby, what a world to come into."

"Knowledge?" said the doctor. "Yes, I suppose that is it. For ever and for ever seeking knowledge. And we don't even know why we seek it. It's an instinct, like self-preservation; and about as comprehensible. Why, I wonder, do I keep on living. I know I've got to die sooner or later, yet I take the best care I can that it shall be later instead of finishing the thing off in a reasonable manner. After all, I've done my bit—propagated my species, and yet for some inscrutable reason I want to go on living and learning. Just an instinct. Some kink in the evolutionary process caused this passion for knowledge, and the result is man—an odd little creature, scuttling around and piling up mountains of this curious commodity. What do you suppose will happen when one day a man sits back in his chair and says: 'Knowledge is complete'? You see, it just sounds silly. We're so used to collecting it, that we can't imagine a world where it is all collected and finished."

"One hears of the Industrial Revolution as though it were a mere phase, finished and done with. It is not, and it shows no sign of ever being completed."

"She had an exasperating feeling that there was a principle somewhere that she had missed; a principle which once grasped would make the whole thing as clear as daylight. But if there was it continued to elude her."

"We have had a glorious past—but a glorious past is bitterness for a child with a hopeless future."

""I'm afraid I'm not very good at understanding things like that." "You say that, but what you really mean is: 'I don't want to understand things like that.' " "It's true," she admitted."

"Fate is not above using inconsiderable details for her obscure purpose."

"There's nothing more egocentric than a cat."

"It's better to have a pistol you don't want, than to want a pistol you've not got."

"Bored! My God, to think that I could ever have been bored up there."

"How many men, do you suppose, realise the limitations of using words to convey our meanings? They may find that there are inconvenient misunderstandings, and blame language, but how many admit that the words are just a substitute for the thing they really lack—mental communication? Precious few. My point is that they do not realise the lack of direct mental communication, because they've never had it. They look on spoken or written language as a natural method of expression, whereas it is really a mechanical process [...]"

"Safe passage along the catwalk of one's own racial code must be achieved through long experience; it is harder still to climb from it to another, and when that other is as involved as a maze and is entirely supported by incomprehensible misconceptions, a foot is bound to slip through the fabric from time to time."

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

"She rummaged in a battered bag beside her, brought out a dirty spoon, and began to taste the beans as if they were one of the jams of paradise."

"'There's a whole lot of people don't seem to understand that you have to talk to a man in his own language before he'll take you seriously.'"

"'You know perfectly well that women can and do - or rather did - handle the most complicated and delicate machines when they took the trouble to understand them. What generally happens is that they're too lazy to take the trouble unless they have to.'"

"'You can't drive a flock of sheep to market in a dead straight line, but there are ways of getting 'em there.'"

"'We've got it all there in the books if we take the trouble to find out about it.'"

"Wondering why one's friends chose to marry the people they did is unprofitable, but recurrent."

"Life in all its forms is strife; the better matched the opponents, the harder the struggle. The most powerful of all weapons is intelligence; any intelligent form dominates by, and therefore survives by, its intelligence."

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

""We ourselves have a tradition of taking beatings, and then winning wars," said Bocker."

"In the country you can at least grow things. You do have a chance. But a city is a sort of desert of bricks and stones. Once you've used up what is there, you're done for."

"'Somehow running away seldom seems to work out well unless you have a pretty good idea what you're running to.""

"But we had learnt, as had many before us, about the bread-alone factor, one needed more than adequate food."

"There was often a great deal of grown-up fuss that seemed disproportionate to causes. The ways of the world were very puzzling. . . ."

"WATCH THOU FOR THE MUTANT !"

"Unfortunately there were certain persons with elastic principles."

"My impression was of an uncomfortably industrious place where there always seemed to be more jobs than people, unless one was careful, so on this particular evening I contrived to lie low until routine sounds told me that it was near enough to the mealtime for me to show myself safely."

""This isn't a nice cosy world for anyone—especially not for anyone that's different," he said."

"There's a type of woman who isn't content until she's made herself some man's slave and doormat—put herself completely in his power."

"'Nobody,' she said, 'nobody but a child, or a child-minded person, expects life to be fair.'"

"'The dove is not a coward to fear the hawk; it is simply wise.'"

"'The law punishes the criminal after he has been successful: it is no use to us.'"

"'In point of fact our ascendancy has been so complete that we are rarely called upon to kill wolves nowadays - in fact, most of us have quite forgotten what it means to have to fight in a personal way against another species. But, when the need arises we have no compunction in fully supporting those who slay the threat whether it is from wolves, insects, bacteria, or filterable viruses; we give no quarter, and certainly expect no pardon.'"

"'Cruelty is as old as life itself.'"

"'And, after all, what is a planet but an island in space?'"

"'The wise lamb does not enrage the lion,' he said. 'It placates him, plays for time, and hopes for the best.'"

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

"Pretty girls are lovely as the flowers in May, but there are so many flowers in May."

"Life isn't very long. You see that plainly when you begin to look at it from the other end. Not time to do very much."

"She agreed, really. But she said, well, this is the kind of world we have to live in. There is so very much that's wrong with it, but then life is so short that the best anyone can do is to come to terms with it while doing her best to preserve her own standards. She said it would be different if we had more time to spare, but now there isn't enough margin to make people do things about it. By the time your children have grown up you're beginning to get old, so it isn't worth trying to do much, and then in another twenty-five years it will be the same for them, and— Why, Diana, what on earth's the matter . . . ?"

"She doesn't think about anything—she's sort of programmed, like a computer. There's a conditioned response system. She hears, and then acceptance, rejection, and reaction drums go click-click-click, and the answer comes out sort of codified, just exactly right for people who use the same code." "Isn't that a little intolerant?" Francis had suggested. "After all, aren't we all rather like that if we consider ourselves honestly?" "To some degree," Zephanie admitted. "Only some people seem to be rigged always to play the house—like fruit machines."

"The vitriol throwers and smilers with knives"

"If life weren't so short it would be worth people's while to do more to put the world to rights."

"We shan't get homo superior without any birth-pangs."

"Look at us—thousands more of us every day. . . In a century or so, we shall be in the Age of Famines. We shall manage to postpone the worst one way and another, but postponement isn't solution, and when the breakdown comes there'll be something so ghastly that the hydrogen-bomb will seem humane by comparison. I'm not romancing. I'm talking about the inevitable time when, unless we do something to stop it, men will be hunting men through ruins, for food. We're letting it drift towards that, with an evil irresponsibility, because with our ordinary short lives we shan't be here to see it. Does our generation care about the misery it is bequeathing? Not it. 'That's their worry,' we say. 'Damn our children's children; we're all right.' ... [...] Like any other animal that overbreeds we shall starve; we shall starve in our millions, in the blackest of all dark ages."

""Darling, you're talking as if all normal-length lives were planned. They aren't, you know. People have to learn how to live them—and by the time they find out, they're nearly gone. No time to remedy mistakes."