John Wyndham

"If life weren't so short it would be worth people's while to do more to put the world to rights."

Everybody ought to be able to swim.

"Look at us—thousands more of us every day. . . In a century or so, we shall be in the Age of Famines. We shall manage to postpone the worst one way and another, but postponement isn't solution, and when the breakdown comes there'll be something so ghastly that the hydrogen-bomb will seem humane by comparison.

I'm not romancing. I'm talking about the inevitable time when, unless we do something to stop it, men will be hunting men through ruins, for food. We're letting it drift towards that, with an evil irresponsibility, because with our ordinary short lives we shan't be here to see it. Does our generation care about the misery it is bequeathing? Not it. 'That's their worry,' we say. 'Damn our children's children; we're all right.' ... [...] Like any other animal that overbreeds we shall starve; we shall starve in our millions, in the blackest of all dark ages."

You owe it to your self-respect to spend a lot of money on yourself.

I have been astonished before, and doubtless shall be again, how the kindliest and most sympathetic of women can pettify and downgrade the searing anguishes of childhood.

One got tired, and not infrequently a little stupid, by the end of a shift.

He listened closely, and nodded several times, though not always where a nod seemed appropriate.

The Americans had got into the habit of regarding the moon as a piece of U.S.-bespoken real estate that they would get around to developing when they were ready.

"We shan't get homo superior without any birth-pangs."

"Five hundred and eighty-four days is a long time to be stuck on a mudbank."

"Darling, you're talking as if all normal-length lives were planned. They aren't, you know. People have to learn how to live them—and by the time they find out, they're nearly gone. No time to remedy mistakes.

I found it difficult to believe that they are real people living real lives. For the first day I was constantly accompanied by the feeling that an unseen director would suddenly call 'Cut', and it would all come to a stop.