John Wyndham - The Day of the Triffids (1951)

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

John Wyndham
We all have our youthful follies, embarrassing to recall — but people somehow find it hard to dismiss as a youthful folly anything that has happened to be a financial success.

John Wyndham
Children have a different convention of the fearful until they have been taught the proper things to be shocked at.

John Wyndham
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.

John Wyndham
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.

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

John Wyndham
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.

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

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

John Wyndham
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.

John Wyndham