Top 90 John Wyndham Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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.”

— John Wyndham

52. “To deprive a gregarious creature of companionship is to maim it, to outrage its nature. The prisoner and the cenobite are aware that the herd exists beyond their exile; they are an aspect of it. But when the herd no longer exists, there is, for the herd creature, no longer entity, a part of no whole; a freak without a place. If he cannot hold on to his reason, then he is lost indeed; most utterly, most fearfully lost, so that he becomes no more than the twitch in the limb of a corpse.”

— John Wyndham

53. “Babies, in a world that already has far too many, remain desirable.”

— John Wyndham

54. “Among the other papers I bought at London Airport was the current number of The Beholder. Thought it is, I am aware, not without its merits and even well thought of in some circles, it leaves me with an abiding sense that it is more given to expressing its first prejudices than its second thoughts. Perhaps if it were to go to press a day later...”

— John Wyndham

55. “When people live their lives by their beliefs objective reality is almost irrelevant. ‘That’s.”

— John Wyndham

56. “I’m quite sure there is a simple way. The trouble is that simple ways so often come out of such complicated research.”

— John Wyndham

57. “Don’t you sometimes wish that you had been born into the Age of Reason, instead of into the Age of the Ostensible Reason?”

— John Wyndham

58. “As a race, we have allowed ourselves to become accustomed to the idea that the proper way to die is in bed, at a ripe age. It is a delusion. The normal end for all creatures comes suddenly.”

— John Wyndham

59. “Something entirely unexpected happened to Bert. Yesterday he had seen her as a child grown up, today it was different. There was a pain in his chest and a hammering, the skin on his temples felt oddly tight, his hand trembled so that he almost dropped the bar he was holding. He leaned back against the wheel, staring at her but unable to speak. A long time seemed to pass before he could say anything, and the words sounded clumsy in his own ears. What.”

— John Wyndham

60. “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 the 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.”

— John Wyndham

61. “Odd, don’t you think? We could drown a litter of kittens that is no sort of threat to us – but these creatures we shall carefully rear.”

— John Wyndham

62. “You are judging by social rules and finding crime. I am considering an elemental struggle, and finding no crime – just grim, primeval danger.”

— John Wyndham

63. “All the old problems, the stale ones, both personal and general, had been solved by one mighty slash.”

— John Wyndham

64. “My great-aunt, and other people’s great-aunts, won all the rights that women need ages ago. All that’s been lacking since then is the social courage to use them. My great-aunt and the rest thought that by technically defeating male privilege they’d scored a great victory. What they didn’t realize is that the greatest enemies of women aren’t men at all, they are women: silly women, lazy women, and smug women.”

— John Wyndham

65. “They persisted in the face of discouragement until they gained the kind of acceptance accorded to the inevitable.”

— John Wyndham

66. “A world where a man is able to hunt his fellow man! How could he be called a man?”

— John Wyndham

67. “Why was I condemned to live in a democracy where every fool’s vote is equal to a sensible man’s? If all the energy that is put into diddling mugs for their votes could be turned on to useful work, what a nation we could be!”

— John Wyndham

68. “In the end, defeat, and the cold, must come. First to the system, then the galaxy, then the universe, and the rest will be silence. Not to admit that is a fools vanity.′ She paused. ′ Yet one grows flowers because they are lovely – not because one wishes them to live forever.”

— John Wyndham

69. “The Upper One sent the Tribulation to destroy them and remind them that existence means constant change.”

— John Wyndham

70. “Self-pity and a sense of high tragedy are going to build nothing at all. So we had better throw them out at once, for it is builders that we must become.”

— John Wyndham

71. “Far away in South Kensington Mrs.”

— John Wyndham

72. “Triffids were at large... I began to loathe them now from more than their carrion-eating habits – they, more than anything else, seemed able to profit and flourish on our disaster...”

— John Wyndham

73. “I don’t think it had ever occurred to me that man’s supremacy is not primarily due to his brain, as most of the books would have one think. It is due to the brain’s capacity to make use of the information conveyed to it by a narrow band of visible light rays.”

— John Wyndham

74. “I told you all this so that you understand that if someone says that something is so, that does not prove that it is so.”

— John Wyndham

75. “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.”

— John Wyndham

76. “Like all parents she is dichotomous, what she really wants is a child genius who is perfectly normal.”

— John Wyndham

77. “There are fears that we would strongly assert, and honestly believe, we have outgrown which, nevertheless, still lie dormant in all of us, ready to be aroused by a careless, unexpected word used at a critical moment.”

— John Wyndham

78. “I’m not bigoted enough to twist facts to suit what I’ve been taught.”

— John Wyndham

79. “Just that mere existence is not enough. One exists by barter. One lives by giving – and taking.”

— John Wyndham

80. “In my experience,’ he told me, ’if you run away from a thing just because you don’t like it you don’t know what you find either. Now running to a thing, that’s a different matter, but what would you want to run to?”

— John Wyndham

81. “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.”

— John Wyndham

82. “What do a few thousands, or a few millions of people matter? Women will just go on making the loss good. But Governments are important–one mustn’t risk them.”

— John Wyndham

83. “Only so few years ago,’ Josella said reflectively, ‘people were wailing about the way those bungalows were destroying the countryside. Now look at them.’ ‘The countryside is having its revenge, all right,’ I said.”

— John Wyndham

84. “A gesture – and a reminder that with all the faults there was so much beauty.”

— John Wyndham

85. “In my experience,’ he told me, ’if you run away from a thing just because.”

— John Wyndham

86. “Como la mente no tiene masa, no utiliza tiempo en desplazarse.”

— John Wyndham

87. “You’d expect her to see reason,’ he muttered. ‘I don’t see why. Most of us don’t – we see habit. She’ll oppose any modification, reasonable or not, that conflicts with her previously trained feelings of what is right and polite – and be quite honestly convinced that she’s showing steadfast strength of character.”

— John Wyndham

88. “Death is just the shocking end of animation; it is dissolution that is final.”

— John Wyndham

89. “It won’t be just one bomb. And it was always too late, my dear. Can you imagine us tolerating any form of rival intelligence on earth, no matter how it got here? Why, we can’t even tolerate anything but the narrowest differences of views within our own race.”

— John Wyndham

90. “The thinking has to be done largely by people who are not directly productive – by people who appear to be living almost entirely on the work of others, but are, in fact, a long-term investment. Learning grew up in the cities, and in great institutions – it was the labor of the countryside that supported them.”

— John Wyndham

91. “Sounds Machiavellian to me. I like to see what I’m aiming at, and go straight for it.’ ‘Most people don’t, even though they’d protest that they do. They prefer to be coaxed or wheedled, or even driven. That way they never make a mistake:.”

— John Wyndham

92. “There is an inability to sustain the tragic mood, a phoenix quality of the mind.”

— John Wyndham

93. “But when people are used to believing a thing is such-and-such a way, and the preachers want them to believe that that’s the way it is; it’s trouble you get, not thanks, for upsetting their ideas.”

— John Wyndham

94. “The laws evolved by one particular species, for the convenience of that species, are, by their nature, concerned only with the capacities of that species – against a species with different capacities they simply become inapplicable.”

— John Wyndham

95. “We don’t seem to be good at integrating novelties with our social lives, do we? The world of the etiquette book fell to pieces at the end of the last century, and there has been no code of manners to tell us how to deal with anything invented since. Not even rules for an individualist to break, which is itself another blow at freedom. Rather a pity, don’t you think?”

— John Wyndham

96. “And isn’t there something a little sad about youth and beauty in any circumstances?”

— John Wyndham

97. “Will you agree to be superseded, and start on the way to extinction without a struggle? I do not think you are decadent enough for that.”

— John Wyndham

98. “For today is part of yesterday. And yesterday and today are parts of being alive. And being alive is not just an affair of the days going clonk-clonk-clonk like the pendulum of a grandfather clock: being alive is something continuous, that does not repeat; something that one should be aware of all the time, sleeping and waking...”

— John Wyndham