The Day of the Triffids

by John Wyndham

“People are funny. All you know about it is the title and the publicity, and you’re shocked. And it’s such a harmless little book, really. Mixture of green-sophisticated and pink-romantic, with patches of schoolgirly-purple. But the title was a good idea.”

“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.”

With the old pattern broken, we have now to find out what mode of life is best suited to the new. We have not simply to start building again; we have to start thinking again—which is much more difficult, and far more distasteful.

You have to talk the kind of lingo they’re accustomed to taking seriously. And it works the other way too. 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.