Wyndham Quotes

Contradict yourself. In order to live, you must remain broken up.

After that, nothing was the same. The very notion of my having a family turned vague, hard to credit, even weirdly jokey.

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

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.

Next morning, we drank endless cups of coffee in the airport restaurant…Suddenly wide-eyed, she stared past me: “Good grief, some of the people they let in here.

All happened so damn fast,” he said. “’Phone call here after she arrived. Her mom and dad were just after leaving Halifax…ten cars, twelve maybe, made it onto the CBC News.

The telegram was sealed – an old-fashioned touch, I thought, but then I’d never had a telegram before. I took my time opening it. I said nothing.

And we danced, on the brink of an unknown future, to an echo from a vanished past.

Often I felt like two people. One went into the world and did the living for the other, who was stuck in an endless moment of knowing. Yesterday was today and hereon in.

Will turned over the last words for a long time. Then he thought about the flashing message-light up in the kitchen.

One thing, though, was for sure – here I was, alive, healthy but as unquiet in my way as they were in theirs. Transcendent equality. You’ve got to love it.

Now I gazed out of my office window. Slowly the world was changing from old-gold to the deep purple which, in the words of that dreamy song Mum was fond of humming, bathes garden walls under the twinkle of starlight.

Nothing looked disturbed…yet everything felt that way. The guy was on the bed, calmness itself, as though he’d decided on a moment’s lie-down and just zizzed off.

As I reached the door, the constable said, “Good luck in Canada, son.” For a second I expected his voice to morph into Uncle Sid’s as he urged me to give his love to Rose Marie and the Mounties.

The essential quality of life is living' the essential quality of living is change; change is evolution; and we are part of it.

Some quotations," said Zellaby, "are greatly improved by lack of context.

If you run away from a thing just because you don't like it, you don't like what you find either.

Knowledge is simply a kind of fuel; it needs the motor of understanding to convert it into power.

She needed him to be him. Even if he could not be hers.

Anybody who has had a great treasure has always led a precarious existence.

I didn't think I should die but I did not know how I would Live.

Why should I? I've done nothing to be ashamed of. I am not ashamed - I am only beaten

Knowing makes all the difference... It's the difference between just trying to keep alive, and having something to live for

It's humiliating to be dependent, anyway, but it's still a poorer pass to have no one to depend on.

There was often a great deal of grown-up fuss that seemed disproportionate to causes.

Children have a different convention of the fearful until they have been taught the proper things to be shocked at.

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.

He would not give her up,he could not.For the first time in his life he'd found someone who filled all the empty spaces in his heart

Apparently Lord Wyndham did regularly donate books to various museums around London. They were usually ones which he had collected earlier, but which were no longer of interest to him or his associates. Irene twitched at the very notion. Give books away? How very frivolous, she finally said.

If you want to keep alive in the jungle, you must live as the jungle does.

What is the good of being an island, if you are not a volcanic island?

It is the tragedy of a distinguished mind and a generous nature that have gone unappreciated in a conventional, unimaginative world. A victim of men's incomprehension of women, a symptom of women's mistrust of men.

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...

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

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.

The dove is not a coward to fear the hawk; it is simply wise.

…after all, what is a planet but an island in space?

Find a nice, self sufficient hilltop, and fortify it.

Why should they be afraid of us? We aren’t hurting them,’ she broke in. “I’m not sure that I know why,’ I told her. ‘But they are. It’s a feel-thing not a think-thing. And the more stupid they are, the more like everyone else they think everyone ought to be. And once they get afraid they become cruel and want to hurt people who are different –

So you're in love with her?' she went on. A word again ... When the minds have learnt to mingle, when no thought is wholly one's own, and each has taken too much of the other ever to be entirely himself alone; when one has reached the beginning of seeing with a single eye, loving with a single heart, enjoying with a single joy; when there can be moments of identity and nothing is separate save bodies that long for one another ... When there is that, where is the word? There is only the inadequacy of the word that exists. 'We love one another,' I said.

The clock is the most sacred thing in a hospital

It is because nature is ruthless, hideous, and cruel beyond belief that it was necessary to invent civilisation.

In my experience,’ he told me, ‘if you run away from a thing just because you don’t like it you don’t know what you find either. Now running to a thing, that’s a different matter, but what would you want to run to?

Miss Wyndham feigned an illness, sneaked out of the house, and walked the London streets unaccompanied for most of the night. At the very least, I’d say she’s a better influence on Miss Kent than Lady Kent is.

I do not think I have ever seen a nastier-looking man... Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist. [on Brit poet Percy Wyndham Lewis]

Art is the expression of an enormous preference.

Darling, whose book is this to be?" "Ostensibly yours, my sweet" "I see -- rather like my life since I met you?" "Yes darling

Instead of the vast organization to exploit the weakness of the Many, should we not possess one for the exploitation of the intelligence of the Few?

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...

When almost half a lifetime has been spent in one conception of order, reorientation is no five-minute business.

You're Beau Wyndham! Well, I'll be damned!' 'The prospect,' said Sir Richard, bored, 'leaves me unmoved

But not she. Her eternity is an article of her faith. Great wars and disasters can ebb and flow, races rise and fall, empires wither with suffering and death, but these are superficialities: she, woman, is perpetual, essential; she will go on for ever.

Personal honesty takes time to assert itself - if it is ever allowed to.

... the more complex they made their world, the less capable they were of dealing with it. They had no means of consensus. They learnt to co-operate constructively in small units; but only destructively in large units. They aspired greedily, and then refused to face the responsibilities they had created. They created vast problems, and then buried their heads in the sands of idle faith.

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. . .

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.

You don't seriously suggest that thet're talking when they make that rattling noise.

It was all conveyed by the nicest, almost indetectably refined blend of sympathy and bitchiness...

There was a huge difference between dislike and disregard.

I'm a reliable witness, you're a reliable witness, practically all God's children are reliable witnesses in their own estimation--which makes it funny how such different ideas of the same affair get about.

It wasn‟t even desire. It was far more than that. It was love. Love. With a capital L and swirly script and hearts and flowers and whatever else the angels— and yes, all those annoying little cupids—wished to use for embellishment.

But it is an inescapable conclusion that life has to be dynamic and not static. Change is bound to come one way or another.

I suppose a book is still a book, even if no one but the author and his wife reads it," she said.

We've got to believe that God is sane, Davie boy. We'd be lost indeed if we didn't do that.

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.

And again there are no words. Words exist that can, used by a poet, achieve a dim monochrome of the body's love, but beyond that they fail clumsily. My love flowed out to her, hers back to me. Mine stroked and soothed. Hers caressed. The distance - and the difference - between us dwindled and vanished. We could meet, mingle, and blend. Neither one of us existed any more; for a time there was a single being that was both. There was escape from the solitary cell; a brief symbiosis, sharing all the word ...

Many great writers address audiences who do not exist; to address passionately and sometimes with very great wisdom people who do not exist has this advantage—that there will always be a group of people who, seeing a man shouting apparently at somebody or other, and seeing nobody else in sight, will think it is they who are being addressed.

My protective coloration isn't intended to deceive you, my sweet. It is intended to deceive me.

I'm quite sure there is a simple way. The trouble is that simple ways so often come out of such complicated research.

The English certainly and fiercely pride themselves in never praising themselves.

They haven't God's word like they thought: God doesn't have any last word. If He did He'd be dead. But He isn't dead; and He changes and grows, like everything else that's alive

In this room,in this minite,she was his everything

Artists put as much vitality and delight into their saintliness and escape out as most men do their escapes into similar places from respectable existence.

There must, I think, be a great many people who go around just longing to be baffled...

Grace-" He scowled, then laughed. "What the devil is your middle name?" "Catriona." she whispered. "Grace Catriona Eversleigh," he said, loud and sure, "I love you.

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;

I'm happy for you Agastya,you're leaving for a more meaningful context. This place is like a parody, a complete farce, they're trying to build another Cambridge here. At my old University I used to teach Macbeth to my MA English classes in Hindi.English in India is burlesque. But now you'll get out of here to somehow a more real situation. In my time I'd wanted to give this Civil Service exam too, I should have. Now I spend my time writing papers for obscure journals on L. H. Myers and Wyndham Lewis, and teaching Conrad to a bunch of half-wits.

I was hiding from them even while I moved among them.

a sort of botanical glory-hole

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.

But, as I understand it, your God is a universal God; He is God on all suns and all planets. Surely, then, He must have universal form? Would it not be a staggering vanity to imagine that He can manifest Himself only in the form that is appropriate to this particular, not very important planet?

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.

We could only control India through force of arms, but force was useless against a people who didn’t fight back; because you couldn’t kill people like that without killing a part of yourself too.

Your work is to survive. Neither his kind, nor his kind of thinking will survive long. They are the crown of creation, they are ambition fulfilled—they have nowhere more to go. But life is change, that is how it differs from the rocks, change is its very nature. Who, then, were the recent lords of creation, that they should expect to remain unchanged?

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.

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.

The essential quality of life is living; the essential quality of living is change; change is evolution: and we are part of it. The static, the enemy of change, is the enemy of life, and therefore our implacable enemy.

The Old People brought down Tribulation, and were broken into fragments by it. Your father and his kind are a part of those fragments. They have become history without being aware of it. They are determined still that there is a final form to defend: soon they will attain the stability they strive for, in the only form it is granted—a place among the fossils.

There is no conception more fallacious than the sense of cosiness implied by "Mother Nature". Each species must strive to survive, and that it will do, by every means in its power, however foul - unless the instinct to survive is weakened by conflict with another instinct.

The intelligence suffers today automatically in consequence of the attack on all authority, advantage, or privilege. These things are not done away with, it is needless to say, but numerous scapegoats are made of the less politically powerful, to satisfy the egalitarian rage awakened.

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...

We are against the glorification of “the People,” as we are against snobbery. It is not necessary to be an outcast bohemian, to be unkempt or poor, any more than it is necessary to be rich or handsome, to be an artist. Art is nothing to do with the coat you wear. A top-hat can well hold the Sixtine. A cheap cap could hide the image of Kephren.

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.

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 the 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.

But let me have silence always, in the centre of the shouting—that is essential! Let me have silence so that no pin may drop and not be heard, and not a whisper escape us for all our spouting, nor the needle's scratching upon this gramophone of a circular cosmic spot. Hear me! Mark me! Learn me! Throw the mind's ear open—shut up the mind's eye—all will be music!

The definition of Man recited itself in my head... And God created man in His own image. And God decreed that man should have one body, one head, two arms and two legs: that each arm should be joined in two places and end in one hand: that each hand should have four fingers and one thumb: that each finger should bear a flat finger-nail...Then God created woman, also, in the same image, but with these differences, according to her nature: her voice would be of higher pitch than man's: she should grow no beard: she should have two breasts... And any creature that shall seem to be human, but is not formed thus is not human. It is neither man, nor woman. It is a blasphemy against the true image of God, and hateful in the sight of God.

The War went on far too long... It was too vast for its meaning, like a giant with the brain of a midge. Its epic proportions were grotesquely out of scale, seeing what it was fought to settle. It was far too indecisive. It settled nothing, as it meant nothing. Indeed, it was impossible to escape the feeling that it was not meant to settle anything - that could have any meaning, or be of any advantage, to the general run of men.

They stamp on any change: they close the way and keep the type fixed because they've got the arrogance to think themselves perfect. As they reckon it, they. and only they, are in the true image; very well, then it follows that if the image is true, they themselves must be God: and, being God, they reckon themselves entitled to decree, "thus far, and no farther." That is their great sin: they try to strangle the life out of Life.

The only sounds in the cave were the hopeless, abandoned sobbing, and plop-plop-plop of the drips. Petra looked at us, then at the figure on the bed, then at us again, expectantly. When neither of us moved she appeared to decide that the initiative lay with her. She crossed to the bedside and knelt down concernedly beside it. Tentatively she put a hand on the dark hair. 'Don't,' she said. 'Please don't.' There was a startled catch in the sobbing. A pause, then a brown arm reached out round Petra's shoulders. The sound became a little less desolate ... it no longer tore at one's heart: but it left it bruised and aching..

We are explorers. We are at present, as far as we know, the only explorers of the universe. For a long time we thought that ours was the only planet that could support life. Then we found others that could – a few. For still longer we thought we were unique – the only intelligent form of life – a single, freakish pinpoint of reason in a vast, adventitious cosmos – utterly lonely in the horrid wastes of space.… Again we discovered we were mistaken… But intelligent life is rare… very rare indeed… the rarest thing in creation… But the most precious… For intelligent life is the only thing that gives meaning to the universe. It is a holy thing, to be fostered and treasured. Without it nothing begins, nothing ends, there can be nothing through all eternity but the mindless babblings of chaos… Therefore, the nurture of all intelligent forms is a sacred duty. Even the merest spark of reason must be fanned in the hope of a flame. Frustrated intelligence must have its bonds broken. Narrow-channelled intelligence must be given the power to widen out. High intelligence must be learned from. That is why I have stayed here.