Fascinating Quotes and Moments

• Man's supremacy is not primarily due to his brain, as most 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.

• The path of safety started to shrink to a tightrope along which we had to walk with our eyes deliberately closed to the depths beneath us.

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

• "So futile to have lived at all - and it might all have been so different," she said. "Good-by, Bill - and thank you for trying to help us."
  I looked down at her as she lay. I felt very angry with the stupidity of death A thousand would have said: "Take me with you"; but she haid said: "Stay with us".
  And I never even knew her name.

• Above it all rose the House of Parliament, with the hands of the clock stopped at three minutes past six. It was difficult to believe that all that meant nothing any more, that it was now just a pretentious confection in uncertain stone which would decay in peace. Let it shower its crumbling pinnacles onto the terrace as it would - there would be no more indignant members complaining of the risk to their valuable lives. Into those halls which had in their day set world echoes to good intentions and said expediencies the roofs could, in due course, fall; there would be none to stop them, and none to care. Alongside, the Thames flowed imperturbably on. So it would flow until the day the Embankments crumble and the water spread out and Westminster became once more an island in a marsh.

• "I'm not trying to say nice things. And what I meant was that in the world that has vanished women had a vested interst in acting the part of parasites."

• "This is a pause - just a heaven-sent pause - while we get over the first shock and start to collect ourselves, but it's no more than a pause. Later we'll have to plow; still later we'll have to learn how to smelt the iron to make the shares. 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. Not until then shall we be able to stop ourselves on the trail that's leading down to savagery. But once we can do that, then maybe we'll begin to crawl slowly up again."

• 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...

• "Don't you still feel sometimes that if you were to close your eyes for a bit you might open them again to find it all as it was, Bill?... I do."

• So we must think of the task ahead as ours alone. We believe now that we can see our way, but there is still a lot of work and research to be done before the day when we, or our children, or their children, will cross the narrow straits on a great crusade to drive the triffids back and back with ceaseless destruction until we have wiped out the last one of them from the face of the land that they have usurped.