The Day Of The Triffids Quotes
"It's surprising how much you don't grow out of when it comes to the test. The elemental fears were still marching along with me, waiting their chance, and pretty nearly getting it."
"Probably I would have been aggrieved about it any morning, but today, this Wednesday, May 8, was an occasion of particular personal importance."
"It was not easy to think oneself back to the outlook of those days. We have to be more self-reliant now."
"It was a world full of horrors and dangers that I should have to face, but I could take my own steps to deal with it—I would no longer be shoved hither and thither by forces and interests that I neither understood nor cared about."
"When I, William Masen, was a child we lived, my father, my mother, and myself, in a southern suburb of London. We had a small house which my father supported by conscientious daily 'attendance at his desk in the Inland Revenue Department, and a small garden at which he worked rather harder during the summer."
"There was not a lot to distinguish us from the ten or twelve million other people who used to live in and around London in those days."
"The human spirit continued much as before—95 per cent of it wanting to live in peace, and the other 5 per cent considering its chances if it should risk starting anything."
"It might well be a world full of horrors and dangers that I should have to face, but I could take my own steps to deal with it—I would no longer be shoved hither and thither by forces and interests that I neither understood nor cared about."
"All the old problems, the stale ones, both personal and general, had been solved by one mighty slash."
"I was emerging as my own master, and no longer a cog."
"I tell you, a triffid's in a damn sight better position to survive than a blind man."
"Take away our sight," he had said, "and our superiority to them is gone."
"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."
"Self-pity and a sense of high tragedy are going to build nothing at all. So we had better throw them out at once, for it is builders that we must become."
"The world we knew has ended in a flash. Some of us may be feeling that it is the end of everything. It is not."
"Man remains physically adaptable to a remarkable degree. But it is the custom of each community to form the minds of its young in a mold, introducing a binding agent of prejudice."
"I had succeeded in keeping them alive, placed between a rival gang on one side and triffids encroaching from the Heath on the other. Now there was this sickness, too. And, when all was said and done, I had achieved only the postponement of starvation for a little while."
"There's a whole lot of people don't seem to understand that you have to talk to a man in his own language before he'll take you seriously."
"Surprising how that jolts 'em. Wonderful thing, the English caste system."
"He doesn't have to believe everything he prints."
"There's a kind of conspiracy not to believe things about triffids."
"Try to imagine a world in which there aren't any Americans-can you do that?"
"What we are on now is a road that will take us back and back and back until we can-if we can-make good all that we wear out."
"To deprive a gregarious creature of companionship is to maim it, to outrage its nature."
"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."
"But when the herd no longer exists, there is, for the herd creature, no longer entity."
"Once-not that year, not the next, but later on-I stood in Piccadilly Circus again, looking round at the desolation and trying to re-create in my mind's eye the crowds that once swarmed there."
"They had become as much a back cloth of history as the audiences in the Roman Colosseum or the army of the Assyrians, and, somehow, just as far removed from me."
"It was at the end of the fourth year that I made my last trip, and found that there were now risks which was not justified in taking."
"KEEP OUT! The advice was backed up by the crack of a rifle and a spurt of dust just in front of me."
"My pleasure in him was at times alloyed with misgivings over the state of things we had created him to face."
"Nature seemed about finished then-'Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?'"
"It's as if everything were breaking out. Rejoicing that we're finished, and that it's free to go its own way."
"The real problem is to find some simple way of dealing with them."
"Am I to understand that you are offering me a kind of-feudal seigneury?"
"I've all I really need," she said, "and someday you're going to bring us back to the rest, Bill."