John Wyndham

"Life isn't very long. You see that plainly when you begin to look at it from the other end. Not time to do very much."

"I'd begun to grasp the principle that the less anybody knows, the less any squealer can give away. And it was easy to see that in a place where questioning was liable to assume the aspect of a blood-s…"

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

"It was so absurd to die at sixty, anyway, and, as he saw it, it would be even more wasteful to die at eighty. A scheme of things in which the wisdom acquired in living was simply scrapped in this way …"

"On the principle that if you walk briskly with an air of purpose ninety-nine per cent of the people you meet will assume it is a proper purpose, I did just that."

"The fact that we don't know how to do it doesn't prove its impossibility."

"'In point of fact our ascendancy has been so complete that we are rarely called upon to kill wolves nowadays - in fact, most of us have quite forgotten what it means to have to fight in a personal way…"

"'Cruelty is as old as life itself.'"