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The Midwich Cuckoos QUOTES

The Midwich Cuckoos QUOTES

1 " 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? "

― John Wyndham , The Midwich Cuckoos

2 " 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. "

― John Wyndham , The Midwich Cuckoos

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

― John Wyndham , The Midwich Cuckoos

4 " It’s all very well for a man. He doesn’t have to go through this sort of thing, and he knows he never will have to. How can he understand? He may mean as well as a saint, but he’s always on the outside. He can never know what it’s like, even in a normal way – so what sort of an idea can he have of this? – Of how it feels to lie awake at night with the humiliating knowledge that one is simply being used? – As if one were not a person at all, but just a kind of mechanism, a sort of incubator.… And then go on wondering, hour after hour, night after night, what – just what it may be that one is being forced to incubate. Of course you can’t understand how that feels – how could you! It’s degrading, it’s intolerable. I shall crack soon. I know I shall. I can’t go on like this much longer. "

― John Wyndham , The Midwich Cuckoos

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

― John Wyndham , The Midwich Cuckoos

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

― John Wyndham , The Midwich Cuckoos

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

― John Wyndham , The Midwich Cuckoos

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

― John Wyndham , The Midwich Cuckoos

9 " You are judging by social rules and finding crime. I am considering an elemental struggle, and finding no crime - just grim, primeval danger "

― John Wyndham , The Midwich Cuckoos

10 " Odd, don’t you think? We could drown a litter of kittens that is no sort of threat to us – but these creatures we shall carefully rear. "

― John Wyndham , The Midwich Cuckoos

11 " sham idealists: the quite large number of people who profess ideals as a form of premium for other-life insurance, and are content to lay up slavery and destitution for their descendants so long as they are enabled to produce personal copybooks of elevated views at the gate of heaven. "

― John Wyndham , The Midwich Cuckoos

12 " In Oppley they're smart, and in Stouch they're smarmy, but Midwich folk are just plain barmy "

― John Wyndham , The Midwich Cuckoos

13 " We have both been given the same wish to survive, We are all, you see, toys of the life-force. It made you numerically stronger, but mentally undeveloped. It made us mentally strong but physically weak: now it has set us at one another, to see what will happen. A cruel sport perhaps, from both our points of view, but a very very old one. Cruelty is as old as life itself. There is some improvement: humour and compassion are the most important of human inventions; but they are not very firmly established yet, though promising well. But the life-force is a lot stronger than they are; and it won't be denied its blood-sports. "

― John Wyndham , The Midwich Cuckoos

14 " Soldiering’ll soon be nothing but wizards and wires. "

― John Wyndham , The Midwich Cuckoos

15 " They persisted in the face of discouragement until they gained the kind of acceptance accorded to the inevitable. "

― John Wyndham , The Midwich Cuckoos

16 " The laws evolved by one particular species, for the convenience of that species, are, by their nature, concerned only with the capacities of that species - against a species with different capacities they simply become inapplicable. "

― John Wyndham , The Midwich Cuckoos

17 " Will you agree to be superseded, and start on the way to extinction without a struggle? I do not think you are decadent enough for that. "

― John Wyndham , The Midwich Cuckoos

18 " laws evolved by one particular species, for the convenience of that species, are, by their nature, concerned only with the capacities of that species—against a species with different capacities they simply become inapplicable. "

― John Wyndham , The Midwich Cuckoos

19 " As a securely dominant species you could afford to lose touch with reality, and amuse yourselves with abstractions, "

― John Wyndham , The Midwich Cuckoos

20 " Far away in South Kensington Mrs "

― John Wyndham , The Midwich Cuckoos