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

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“I have tried to mislead you. I am not humble at all. I have no humility and I do not fear you in the least. If I pretend to be shy, if I appear to hesitate, it is only a sham to deceive. By playing the humble part, I sucker my fellow men in and seduce them of their trust. And then, if it suits my advantage, I lower the boom – mercilessly. I lied when I stated that I had no sense of myself. I am very well aware of my style. My vanity is as vast as the scope of a dream, my heart is that of a tyrant, my arm is the arm of the Executioner. It is only the failure of my plots that I fear.”
― Eldridge Cleaver, quote from Soul on Ice

“People say that time heals all wounds, and maybe they're right. But what if the wounds don't heal correctly, like when cuts leave behind nasty scars, or when broken bones mend together, but aren't as smooth anymore? Does it mean they're really healed? Or is it that the body did what it could to fix what broke...”
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“You came all this way for a whore?” Albert asked, and Royce shot him a harsh look.

“Don’t call her that if you want to live a long and happy life,” Hadrian said as they dismounted.

“But this is a whorehouse—a brothel, right? And you’re here to see a woman, so—”

“So keep talking, Albert.” Hadrian tied his horse to the post. “Just let me get farther away.”

Gwen saved our lives,” Royce said, looking up at the porch. “I beat on doors. I even yelled for help.” He looked at Albert, letting that image sink in. Yes, I yelled for help. “No one cared.” Royce gestured toward Hadrian. “He was dying in a pool of blood, and I was about to pass out. Broken leg, my side sliced open, the world spinning. Then she was there saying, ‘I’ve got you. You’ll be all right now.’ We would have died in the mud and the rain, but she took us in, nursed us back to health. People were after us—lots of people … lots of powerful people—but she kept us hidden for weeks, and she never asked for payment or explanation. She never asked for anything.” Royce turned back to Albert. “So if you call her a whore again, I’ll cut your tongue out and nail it to your chest.”

Albert nodded. “Point taken.”

Royce climbed the steps to the House and rapped once.

Albert leaned over to Hadrian and whispered, “He knocks at a—”

“Royce can still hear you.” Hadrian stopped him.

“Really?”

“Pretty sure. You have no idea how much trouble I got into before I learned that. Now I never say anything I don’t want him to know.”
― Michael J. Sullivan, quote from The Rose and the Thorn

“vowing himself to “just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty.” After”
― Philip Roth, quote from Indignation

“As for the coldness, I have never seen it like this. I mean, coldness that makes like it wants to kill you, like it's telling you, with its snow, that you should go back to where you came from.”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, quote from We Need New Names

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