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John Wyndham

John Wyndham Quotes

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Famous John Wyndham Quotes

“You are determined to assume an antagonism between machines and men. You don't understand them. It's your persistent mishandling of them that makes you afraid of them. Why should there be an antagonism? There was a time when we could not exist without them nor they without us, and now, thought that no longer holds, the collaboration continues. Doubtless if they wished they could make an end of us today, but why should they? We are doomed inevitably; they will go on.”

HumanityTechnologyFutureScience FictionArtificial IntelligenceMachineRobot
Book:Stowaway to Mars
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“The only sounds in the cave were the hopeless, abandoned sobbing, and plop-plop-plop of the drips. Petra looked at us, then at the figure on the bed, then at us again, expectantly. When neither of us moved she appeared to decide that the initiative lay with her. She crossed to the bedside and knelt down concernedly beside it. Tentatively she put a hand on the dark hair. 'Don't,' she said. 'Please don't.' There was a startled catch in the sobbing. A pause, then a brown arm reached out round Petra's shoulders. The sound became a little less desolate ... it no longer tore at one's heart: but it left it bruised and aching..”

Touching
Book:The chrysalids
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“Sophie dear,' I said. 'Are you in love with him - with this spider-man?' 'Oh, don't call him that - please - we can't any of us help being what we are. His name's Gordon. He's kind to me, David. He's fond of me. You've got to have as little as I have to know how much that means. You've never known loneliness. You can't understand the awful emptiness that's waiting all round us here. I'd have given him babies gladly, if I could. ... I - oh, why do they do that to us? Why didn't they kill me? It would have been kinder than this...' She sat without a sound. The tears squeezed out from under the closed lids and ran down her face. I took her hand between my own. I remembered watching. The man with his arm linked in the woman's, the small figure on top of the pack-horse waving back to me as they disappeared into the trees. Myself desolate, a kiss still damp on my cheek, a lock tied with a yellow ribbon in my hand. I looked at her now, and my heart ached.”

Touching
Book:The chrysalids
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“There was the feeling, too, that she no longer belonged – that she had become a stranger in another people’s world. It had all altered so much; first changing into a place that it was difficult to understand, then growing so much more complex that one gave up trying to understand. No wonder, she thought, that the old become possessive about things; cling to objects which link them with the world that they could understand…”

ChangeBelongingAgeingLonliness
Book:Consider Her Ways and Others
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“What do you think it is that makes a man" I started on the Definition. He cut me of after five words. "It is not!" he said. "A wax figure could have all that, and he'd still be a wax figure, wouldn't he?" ... "Well, then, what makes a man a man is something inside him." "A soul?" I suggested. "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.”

MindScience Fiction
Author:John Wyndham
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“Until then I had always thought of loneliness as something negative—an absence of company, and, of course, something temporary... That day I had learned that it was much more. It was something which could press and oppress, could distort the ordinary and play tricks with the mind. Something which lurked inimically all around, stretching the nerves and twanging them with alarms, never letting one forget that there was no one to help, no one to care. It showed one as an atom adrift in vastness, and it waited all the time its chance to frighten and frighten horribly—that was what loneliness was really trying to do; and that was what one must never let it do...”

Loneliness
Book:The Day of the Triffids
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“For ever and for ever seeking knowledge. And we don't even know why we seek it. It's an instinct, like self-preservation; and about as comprehensible. Why, I wonder, do I keep on living? I know that I've got to die sooner or later, yet I take the best care I can that it shall be later instead of finishing the thing off in a reasonable manner. After all, I've done my bit — propagated my species, and yet for some inscrutable reason I want to go on living and learning. Just an instinct. Some kink in the evolutionary process caused this passion for knowledge, and the result is man — an odd little creature, scuttling around and piling up mountains of this curious commodity.”

KnowledgeLearningStudyCuriosity
Book:Stowaway to Mars
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“It’s all very well for a man. He doesn’t have to go through this sort of thing, and he knows he never will have to. How can he understand? He may mean as well as a saint, but he’s always on the outside. He can never know what it’s like, even in a normal way – so what sort of an idea can he have of this? – Of how it feels to lie awake at night with the humiliating knowledge that one is simply being used? – As if one were not a person at all, but just a kind of mechanism, a sort of incubator.… And then go on wondering, hour after hour, night after night, what – just what it may be that one is being forced to incubate. Of course you can’t understand how that feels – how could you! It’s degrading, it’s intolerable. I shall crack soon. I know I shall. I can’t go on like this much longer.”

SacrificePregnancyPowerlessness
Book:The Midwich cuckoos
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“In the last few years we had learnt more of the people round us, and the way they felt. What had seemed, five or six years ago, a kind of rather disquieting game had grown grimmer as we understood more about it. Essentially, it had not changed. Still our whole consideration if we were to survive must be to keep our true selves hidden; to walk, talk, and live indistinguishably from other people. We had a gift, a sense which, Michael complained bitterly, should have been a blessing, but was little better than a curse. The stupidest norm was happier; he could feel that he belonged. We did not, and because we did not, we had no positive — we were condemned to negatives, to not revealing ourselves, to not speaking when we would, to not using what we knew, to not being found out — to a life of perpetual deception, concealment, and lying. The prospect of continued negativeness stretching out ahead chafed him more than it did the rest of us. His imagination took him further, giving him a clearer vision of what such frustrations were going to mean, but it was no better at suggesting an alternative than ours were.”

NormalcyDeviation
Book:The chrysalids
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“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.”

FeminismWomen S SuffrageSuffrage Movement
Book:Trouble with Lichen
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“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.”

ThinkingMenBookUseLightMightLostAbilityBrainAchieveInformationCivilizationBandRedCapacityDuesRangePerceiveVisibleRaysHungVioletVibrationsSupremacyVisible Light
Author:John Wyndham
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“There is an inability to sustain the tragic mood, a phoenix quality of the mind. It may be helpful or harmful, it is just a part of the will to survive—yet, also, it has made it possible for us to engage in one weakening war after another. But it is a necessary part of our mechanism that we should be able to cry only for a time over even an ocean of spilt milk—the spectacular must soon become the commonplace if life is to be supportable.”

IfsShouldMindMayMadeWarAbleLife IsQualityCryOceanMoodMade ItTragicHelpfulMilkMechanismInabilitySpectacularCommonplacePhoenixWeakeningWill To SurviveSpilt Milk
Book:The Day of the Triffids
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“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.”

MindHeartLongSaidMomentsBodyEyeJoyEnjoyTakenToo MuchSeeingIdentityLove One AnotherInadequacySingle Eye
Author:John Wyndham
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“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.”

BodyUsedDifferencesFailingAchieveMinesPoetDistanceCellsSolitarySymbiosisMonochrome
Author:John Wyndham
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“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.”

IfsReasonWholeLostCreaturesAspectPrisonerFreakEntityCompanionshipLimbsExileCorpsesHerdsOutrageGregarious
Author:John Wyndham
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