John Wyndham quotes:

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

I'm a reliable witness, you're a reliable witness, practically all God's children are reliable witnesses in their own estimation--which makes it funny how such different ideas of the same affair get about.

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

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

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

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

No... souls are just counters for churches to collect, all the same value, like nails. No, what makes man man is mind; it's not a thing, it's a quality, and minds aren't all the same value; they're better or worse, and the better they are, the more they mean.

The clock is the most sacred thing in a hospital.

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

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.

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

But not she. Her eternity is an article of her faith. Great wars and disasters can ebb and flow, races rise and fall, empires wither with suffering and death, but these are superficialities: she, woman, is perpetual, essential; she will go on for ever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And again there are no words. Words exist that can, used by a poet, achieve a dim monochrome of the body's love, but beyond that they fail clumsily. My love flowed out to her, hers back to me. Mine stroked and soothed. Hers caressed. The distance - and the difference - between us dwindled and vanished. We could meet, mingle, and blend. Neither one of us existed any more; for a time there was a single being that was both. There was escape from the solitary cell; a brief symbiosis, sharing all the word ...

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. His civilization, all that he had achieved or might achieve, hung upon his ability to perceive that range of vibrations from red to violet. Without that, he was lost.

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.

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

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.

I shall pray to God to send charity to this hideous world, and sympathy for the weak, and love for the unhappy and unfortunate. I shall ask Him if is indeed His will that a child should suffer and its soul be damned for a little blemish on the body....And I shall pray Him, too, that the hearts of the self-righteous may be broken...

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

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

So you're in love with her?' she went on. A word again ... When the minds have learnt to mingle, when no thought is wholly one's own, and each has taken too much of the other ever to be entirely himself alone; when one has reached the beginning of seeing with a single eye, loving with a single heart, enjoying with a single joy; when there can be moments of identity and nothing is separate save bodies that long for one another ... When there is that, where is the word? There is only the inadequacy of the word that exists. 'We love one another,' I said.

But, as I understand it, your God is a universal God; He is God on all suns and all planets. Surely, then, He must have universal form? Would it not be a staggering vanity to imagine that He can manifest Himself only in the form that is appropriate to this particular, not very important planet?

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

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

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.