Quotes from The Day of the Triffids

“When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.”
― John Wyndham, quote from The Day of the Triffids

“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, quote from The Day of the Triffids

“And we danced, on the brink of an unknown future, to an echo from a vanished past.”
― John Wyndham, quote from The Day of the Triffids

“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...”
― John Wyndham, quote from The Day of the Triffids

“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, quote from The Day of the Triffids

“Anybody who has had a great treasure has always led a precarious existence.”
― John Wyndham, quote from The Day of the Triffids

“It's humiliating to be dependent, anyway, but it's still a poorer pass to have no one to depend on.”
― John Wyndham, quote from The Day of the Triffids

“Children have a different convention of the fearful until they have been taught the proper things to be shocked at.”
― John Wyndham, quote from The Day of the Triffids

“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.”
― John Wyndham, quote from The Day of the Triffids

“Most people […] prefer to be coaxed or wheedled, or even driven. That way they never make a mistake: if there is one, it's always due to something or somebody else”
― John Wyndham, quote from The Day of the Triffids

“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, quote from The Day of the Triffids

“The clock is the most scared thing in a hospital”
― John Wyndham, quote from The Day of the Triffids

“You don't seriously suggest that thet're talking when they make that rattling noise.”
― John Wyndham, quote from The Day of the Triffids

“Half the political intelligentsia who talk to a working audience don’t get the value of their stuff across—not so much because they’re over their audience’s heads, as because half the chaps are listening to the voice and not to the words, so they knock a big discount off what they do hear because it’s all a bit fancy, and not like ordinary, normal talk.”
― John Wyndham, quote from The Day of the Triffids

“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;”
― John Wyndham, quote from The Day of the Triffids

“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.”
― John Wyndham, quote from The Day of the Triffids

“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, quote from The Day of the Triffids

“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, quote from The Day of the Triffids

“When almost half a lifetime has been spent in one conception of order, reorientation is no five-minute business.”
― John Wyndham, quote from The Day of the Triffids

“every day it was tomorrow that I’d be able to do it, and each day it became more difficult.”
― John Wyndham, quote from The Day of the Triffids

“Marvelously clear-fretted in the unsmoked air, the Abbey rose, silver-grey. It stood detached by the serenity of age from the ephemeral growths around it. It was solid on a foundation of centuries, destined, perhaps, for centuries yet to preserve within it the monuments to those whose work was now all destroyed. I did not loiter there. In years to come I expect some will go o look at the old Abbey with romantic melancholy. But romance of that kind is an alloy of tragedy with retrospect. I was too close.”
― John Wyndham, quote from The Day of the Triffids

“I was hiding from them even while I moved among them.”
― John Wyndham, quote from The Day of the Triffids

“You know, one of the most shocking things about it is to realize how easily we have lost a world that seemed so safe and certain."

She was quite right. It was that simplicity that seemed somehow to be the nucleus of the shock. From very familiarity one forgets all the forces which keep the balance, and thinks of security as normal. It is not.”
― John Wyndham, quote from The Day of the Triffids

“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 little time and place is beyond cataclysms. And now it was happening here.”
― John Wyndham, quote from The Day of the Triffids

“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.”
― John Wyndham, quote from The Day of the Triffids

“It’s humiliating to be dependent, anyway, but it’s a still poorer pass to have no one to depend on.”
― John Wyndham, quote from The Day of the Triffids

“appreciating a private room. In a public ward the messy proceeding would have taken place a whole unnecessary hour”
― John Wyndham, quote from The Day of the Triffids

“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. He is a part of no whole, a freak without a place. If he cannot hold onto his reason, then he is lost indeed: most utterly and most fearfully lost, so that he becomes no more than the twitch in the limb of a corpse. It”
― John Wyndham, quote from The Day of the Triffids

Video

About the author

Popular quotes

“The orchestra strikes up with ‘Stockholm in My Heart’, and everyone joins in. Hands sway in the air, mobile phone cameras are raised. A wonderful feeling of togetherness. It will be another fifteen minutes until, with meticulous premeditation, the whole thing is torn to shreds. Let us sing along for the time being. We have a long way to go before we return here. Only when the journey has softened us up, when we are ready to think the unthinkable, will we be permitted to come back.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, quote from Little Star

“Matt heaved on the door as hard as he could. It wouldn't budge.
"Spread out," Laurie said. "Find another entrance -"
Matt pulled Mjölnir back and swung it at the glass door. It shattered on impact.
"Or we could do that," Laurie said.”
― K.L. Armstrong, quote from Thor's Serpents

“So perhaps the best resource is to meet everything passively, to make yourself an inert mass, to stare at others with the eyes of an animal, to feel no compunction, with your own hand to throttle down whatever ghostly life remains in you.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from The Complete Short Stories

“Oh, you mean so we can coexist? What kind of let’s-hold-hands hippie shit are you suggesting?”
― Blake Crouch, quote from Wayward

“You're not supposed to interject feelings into science, but part of the reason it's so fascinating that we're 8 percent (or more) fossilized virus is that it's so creepy that we're 8 percent (or more) fossilized virus.”
― Sam Kean, quote from The Violinist's Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.