94 Quotes by John Wyndham

Pretty nearly any stroke of fate can be made to look like a funny coincidence if you try hard enough and wait long enough.

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

The simple rely on a bolstering mass of maxim and precept, so do the timid, so do the mentally lazy – and so do all of us, more than we imagine.

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 leader does the planning, but he’s wise enough not to say so. As the changes become necessary, he slips them in as a concession – temporary, of course – to circumstances, but if he’s good, he’s slipping in the right bits for the ultimate shape.

It’s not my fault if I’m not any good at things like that.” “I’ll differ there,” Coker told her. “It’s not only your fault – it’s a self-created fault. Moreover, it’s an affectation to consider yourself too spiritual to understand anything mechanical. It is a petty and a very silly form of vanity. Everyone starts by knowing nothing about anything, but God gives him – and even her – brains to find out with. Failure to use them is not a virtue to be praised;.

Nobody is going to be muddle-headed enough to confuse ignorance with innocence now – it’s too important. Nor is ignorance going to be cute or funny anymore. It is going to be dangerous, very dangerous.

In temperate countries, where man had succeeded in putting most forms of nature save his own under a reasonable degree of restraint, the status of the triffid was thus made quite clear. But in the tropics, particularly in the dense forest areas, they quickly became a scourge.

All my life I have been surrounded by things I’d rather not know too much about, so I have come to feel that truth made naked without purpose is really a wanton.