John Wyndham
120 quotes
Biography
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."