John Wyndham Quotes

There is many a flower which would not be growing if the dung had not happened to fall where it did.

Most births are painful, and none are pretty.

One got tired, and not infrequently a little stupid, by the end of a shift.

You owe it to your self-respect to spend a lot of money on yourself.

"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.

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.

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

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

the vitriol throwers and smilers with knives

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.

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 . . . ?

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.

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

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

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