“All men, however highly educated, retain some superstitious inklings.”
― H.G. Wells, quote from The Invisible Man
“Alone-- it is wonderful how little a man can do alone! To rob a little, to hurt a little, and there is the end.”
― H.G. Wells, quote from The Invisible Man
“I went over the heads of the things a man reckons desirable. No doubt invisibility made it possible to get them, but it made it impossible to enjoy them when they are got.”
― H.G. Wells, quote from The Invisible Man
“The Anglo-Saxon genius for parliamentary government asserted itself; there was a great deal of talk and no decisive action.”
― H.G. Wells, quote from The Invisible Man
“I never blame anyone," said Kemp. "It's quite out of fashion.”
― H.G. Wells, quote from The Invisible Man
“...the voice was indisputable. It continued to swear with that breadth and variety that distinguishes the swearing of a cultivated man.”
― H.G. Wells, quote from The Invisible Man
“But-! I say! The common conventions of humanity-'
'Are all very well for common people.”
― H.G. Wells, quote from The Invisible Man
“To do such a thing would be to transcend magic. And I beheld, unclouded by doubt, a magnificent vision of all that invisibility might mean to a man—the mystery, the power, the freedom. Drawbacks I saw none. You have only to think! And I, a shabby, poverty-struck, hemmed-in demonstrator, teaching fools in a provincial college, might suddenly become—this.”
― H.G. Wells, quote from The Invisible Man
“Everyone seemed eager to talk at once, and the result was Babel.”
― H.G. Wells, quote from The Invisible Man
“Very well," said the Voice, in a tone of relief. "Then I'm going to throw flints at you till you think differently.”
― H.G. Wells, quote from The Invisible Man
“The stranger came early in February, one wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking as it seemed from Bramblehurst railway station, and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand. He was wrapped up from head to foot, and the brim of his soft felt hat hid every inch of his face but the shiny tip of his nose; the snow had piled itself against his shoulders and chest, and added a white crest to the burden he carried. He staggered into the Coarch and Horses, more dead than alive as it seemed, and flung his portmanteau down. "A fire," he cried, "in the name of human charity! A room and a fire!" He stamped and shook the snow from off himself in the bar, and followed Mrs. Hall into her guest parlour to strike his bargain. And with that much introduction, that and a ready acquiescence to terms and a couple of sovereigns flung upon the table, he took up his quarters in the inn.”
― H.G. Wells, quote from The Invisible Man
“I felt amazingly confident,—it’s not particularly pleasant recalling that I was an ass.”
― H.G. Wells, quote from The Invisible Man
“In the middle of the night she woke up dreaming of huge white heads like turnips, that came trailing after her, at the end of interminable necks, and with vast black eyes. But being a sensible woman, she subdued her terrors and turned over and went to sleep again.”
― H.G. Wells, quote from The Invisible Man
“But giving drugs to a cat is no joke, Kemp!”
― H.G. Wells, quote from The Invisible Man
“Great and strange ideas transcending experience often have less effect upon men and women than smaller, more tangible considerations.”
― H.G. Wells, quote from The Invisible Man
“The stranger came early in February, one wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking from Bramblehurst railway station, and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand.”
― H.G. Wells, quote from The Invisible Man
“He lit the dining-room lamp, got out a cigar, and began pacing the room, ejaculating.”
― H.G. Wells, quote from The Invisible Man
“And there it was, on a shabby bed in a tawdry, ill-lighted bedroom, surrounded by a crowd of ignorant and excited people, broken and wounded, betrayed and unpitied, that Griffin, the first of all men to make himself invisible, Griffin, the most gifted physicist the world has ever seen, ended in infinite disaster his strange and terrible career.”
― H.G. Wells, quote from The Invisible Man
“The stranger swore briefly but vividly.”
― H.G. Wells, quote from The Invisible Man
“There’s some ex-traordinary things in books,” said the mariner.”
― H.G. Wells, quote from The Invisible Man
“He extended his hand: It seemed to meet something in mid-air, and he drew it back with a sharp exclamation. "I wish you'd keep your fingers out of my eye," said the aerial voice, in a tone of savage expostulation.”
― H.G. Wells, quote from The Invisible Man
“Herbert George Wells, better known as H. G. Wells, was an English writer best known for such science fiction novels as The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man and The Island of Doctor Moreau. He was a prolific writer of both fiction and non-fiction, and produced works in many different genres, including contemporary novels, history, and social commentary. He was also an outspoken socialist. His later works become increasingly political and didactic, and only his early science fiction novels are widely read today. Wells, along with Hugo Gernsback and Jules Verne, is sometimes referred to as "The Father of Science Fiction". Source: Wikipedia”
― H.G. Wells, quote from The Invisible Man
“Ambition—what is the good of pride of place when you cannot appear there? What is the good of the love of woman when her name must needs be Delilah?”
― H.G. Wells, quote from The Invisible Man
“Mr. Thomas Marvel hated roomy shoes, but then he hated damp. He had never properly thought out which he hated most”
― H.G. Wells, quote from The Invisible Man
“On the village green an inclined strong, down which, clinging the while to a pulley-swung handle, one could be hurled violently against a sack at the other end, came in for considerable favour among the adolescent, as also did the swings and the cocoanut shies.”
― H.G. Wells, quote from The Invisible Man
“Oliver, my professor, was a scientific bounder, a journalist by instinct, a thief of ideas,—he was always prying! And you know the knavish system of the scientific world. I simply would not publish, and let him share my credit. I went on working, I got nearer and nearer making my formula into an experiment, a reality. I told no living soul, because I meant to flash my work upon the world with crushing effect and become famous at a blow. I took up the question of pigments to fill up certain gaps. And suddenly, not by design but by accident, I made a discovery in physiology.”
― H.G. Wells, quote from The Invisible Man
“I did not feel a bit sorry for my father. He seemed to me to be the victim of his own foolish sentimentality. The”
― H.G. Wells, quote from The Invisible Man
“The stranger did not go to church, and indeed made no difference between Sunday and the irreligious days, even in costume. He worked, as Mrs. Hall thought, very fitfully. Some days he would come down early and be continuously busy. On others he would rise late, pace his room, fretting audibly for hours together, smoke, sleep in the armchair by the fire. Communication with the world beyond the village he had none. His temper continued very uncertain; for the most part his manner was that of a man suffering under almost unendurable provocation, and once or twice things were snapped, torn, crushed, or broken in spasmodic gusts of violence. He seemed under a chronic irritation of the greatest intensity. His habit of talking to himself in a low voice grew steadily upon him, but though Mrs. Hall listened conscientiously she could make neither head nor tail of what she heard.”
― H.G. Wells, quote from The Invisible Man
“I had never realised it before, but the nose is to the mind of a dog what the eye is to the mind of a seeing man. Dogs perceive the scent of a man moving as men perceive his vision. This”
― H.G. Wells, quote from The Invisible Man
“I wish you'd keep your fingers out of my eye," said the aerial voice, in a tone of savage expostulation. "The fact is, I'm all here:head, hands, legs, and all the rest of it, but it happens I'm invisible. It's a confounded nuisance, but I am. That's no reason why I should be poked to pieces by every stupid bumpkin in Iping, is it?”
― H.G. Wells, quote from The Invisible Man
H.G. Wells
Born place: in Bromley, Kent, England, The United Kingdom
Born date September 21, 1866
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“They laugh at this, the idea that one might keep herds of friendly deer or elk that walk happily to their slaughter whenever it's time for the human to eat meat. Some ask openly if there aren't consequences of a life so easy to live.”
― Joseph Boyden, quote from The Orenda
“But most dragons seem to have interesting personalities--besides probably having quite good reasons for what they do, if only one could understand them”
― Diana Wynne Jones, quote from Fire and Hemlock
“Studentdom, he felt, must pass its own Examinations and define its own Commencement--a slow, most painful process, made the more anguishing by bloody intelligences like the Bonifacists of Siegfrieder College. Yet however it seemed at times that men got nowhere, but only repeated class by class the mistakes of their predecessors, two crucial facts about them were at once their hope and the limitation of their possibility, so he believed. One was their historicity: the campus was young, the student race even younger, and by contrast with the whole of past time, the great collegiate cultures had been born only yesterday. The other had to do with comparative cyclology, a field of systematic speculation he could not review for me just then, but whose present relevance lay in the correspondency he held to obtain between the life-history of individuals and the history of studentdom in general. As the embryologists maintained that ontogeny repeats phylogeny, so, Max claimed, the race itself--and on a smaller scale, West-Campus culture--followed demonstrably--in capital letters, as it were, or slow motion--the life-pattern of its least new freshman. This was the basis of Spielman's Law--ontogeny repeats cosmogeny--and there was much more to it and to the science of cyclology whereof it was first principle. The important thing for now was that, by his calculations, West-Campus as a whole was in mid-adolescence...
'Look how we been acting,' he invited me, referring to intercollegiate political squabbles; 'the colleges are spoilt kids, and the whole University a mindless baby, ja? Okay: so weren't we all once, Enos Enoch too? And we got to admit that the University's a precocious kid. If the history of life on campus hadn't been so childish, we couldn't hope it'll reach maturity.' Studentdom had passed already, he asserted, from a disorganized, pre-literate infancy (of which Croaker was a modern representative, nothing ever being entirely lost) through a rather brilliant early childhood ('...ancient Lykeion, Remus, T'ang...') which formed its basic and somewhat contradictory character; it had undergone a period of naive general faith in parental authority (by which he meant early Founderism) and survived critical spells of disillusionment, skepticism, rationalism, willfulness, self-criticism, violence, disorientation, despair, and the like--all characteristic of pre-adolescence and adolescence, at least in their West-Campus form. I even recognized some of those stages in my own recent past; indeed, Max's description of the present state of West-Campus studentdom reminded me uncomfortably of my behavior in the Lady-Creamhair period: capricious, at odds with itself, perverse, hard to live with. Its schisms, as manifested in the Quiet Riot, had been aggravated and rendered dangerous by the access of unwonted power--as when, in the space of a few semesters, a boy finds himself suddenly muscular, deep-voiced, aware of his failings, proud of his strengths, capable of truly potent love and hatred--and on his own. What hope there was that such an adolescent would reach maturity (not to say Commencement) without destroying himself was precisely the hope of the University.”
― John Barth, quote from Giles Goat-Boy
“songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality. Some different republic, some liberated republic... whatever the case, it wasn't that I was anti-popular culture or anything and I had no ambition to stir things up. I just thought of mainstream culture as lame as hell and a big trick. It was like the unbroken sea of frost that lay outside the window and you had to have awkward footgear to walk with.”
― Bob Dylan, quote from Chronicles, Volume One
“My master Thomas More would give anything to anyone. Some say that’s good and some say that’s bad, but I say he can’t help it—and that’s bad…because some day someone’s going to ask him for something that he wants to keep; and he’ll be out of practice”
― Robert Bolt, quote from A Man for All Seasons
The First Fifteen Li...
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