"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 (The Day of the Triffids)

"I shall pray to God to send charity to this hideous world, and sympathy for the weak, and love for the unhappy and unfortunate. I shall ask Him if is indeed His will that a child should suffer and its soul be damned for a little blemish on the body....And I shall pray Him, too, that the hearts of the self-righteous may be broken... "
— John Wyndham (The Chrysalids)

"Why should I? I've done nothing to be ashamed of. I am not ashamed - I am only beaten"
— John Wyndham (The Chrysalids)

"Anybody who has had a great treasure has always led a precarious existence."
— John Wyndham (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 (The Day of the Triffids)

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

"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 (The Day of the Triffids)

"Moreover, I was beginning to experience something new - the fear of being alone. I had not been alone since I walked from the hospital along Piccadilly, and then there had been bewildering novelty in all I saw. Now,for the first time I began to feel the horror that real loneliness holds for a species that is by nature gregarious. I felt naked, exposed to all the fears that prowled..."
— John Wyndham

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