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The Kraken Wakes

John Wyndham

Top 10 Best Quotes

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“The Sunday Tidings, which had for some years been pursing a policy of intellectual sensationalism, had never found it easy to maintain its supply of material. The stuff of mere emotional sensationalism, as used by its cheaper and less dignified contemporaries, lay thickly all around, easily malleable into shapes attractive to the constant human passions. Intellectual sensationalism, however, was a much more tricky business. In addition to avoiding the suggestion of sensationalism for sensationalism's sake, it required knowledge, research, careful timing, and, if possible, some literary ability. Inevitably, therefore, its policy was subject to lamentable gaps during which it could find nothing topical on its chosen level to disclose.”

“Failure. That is a word so little to our taste that many think it a virtue to claim that they never admit it. But blind stupidity is not one of the virtues; it is a weakness...”

“Don't you sometimes wish that you had been born into the Age of Reason, instead of into the Age of the Ostensible Reason?”

“Among the other papers I bought at London Airport was the current number of The Beholder. Thought it is, I am aware, not without its merits and even well thought of in some circles, it leaves me with an abiding sense that it is more given to expressing its first prejudices than its second thoughts. Perhaps if it were to go to press a day later....”

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Book Keywords:

human-nature, relationships, humour

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