The Chrysalids QUOTES

2 " The essential quality of life is living' the essential quality of living is change; change is evolution; and we are part of it. "

― John Wyndham , The Chrysalids

4 " So you're in love with her?' she went on.

A word again ... When the minds have learnt to mingle, when no thought is wholly one's own, and each has taken too much of the other ever to be entirely himself alone; when one has reached the beginning of seeing with a single eye, loving with a single heart, enjoying with a single joy; when there can be moments of identity and nothing is separate save bodies that long for one another ... When there is that, where is the word? There is only the inadequacy of the word that exists.

'We love one another,' I said. "

― John Wyndham , The Chrysalids

6 " Knowing makes all the difference... It's the difference between just trying to keep alive, and having something to live for "

― John Wyndham , The Chrysalids

8 " Why should they be afraid of us? We aren’t hurting them,’ she broke in.

“I’m not sure that I know why,’ I told her. ‘But they are. It’s a feel-thing not a think-thing. And the more stupid they are, the more like everyone else they think everyone ought to be. And once they get afraid they become cruel and want to hurt people who are different – "

― John Wyndham , The Chrysalids

10 " And again there are no words.

Words exist that can, used by a poet, achieve a dim monochrome of the body's love, but beyond that they fail clumsily.

My love flowed out to her, hers back to me. Mine stroked and soothed. Hers caressed. The distance - and the difference - between us dwindled and vanished. We could meet, mingle, and blend. Neither one of us existed any more; for a time there was a single being that was both. There was escape from the solitary cell; a brief symbiosis, sharing all the word ... "

― John Wyndham , The Chrysalids

12 " In my experience,’ he told me, ‘if you run away from a thing just because you don’t like it you don’t know what you find either. Now running to a thing, that’s a different matter, but what would you want to run to? "

― John Wyndham , The Chrysalids

14 " When I was quite small I would sometimes dream of a city - which was strange, because it began before I even knew what a city was. "

― John Wyndham , The Chrysalids

16 " They stamp on any change: they close the way and keep the type fixed because they've got the arrogance to think themselves perfect. As they reckon it, they. and only they, are in the true image; very well, then it follows that if the image is true, they themselves must be God: and, being God, they reckon themselves entitled to decree, "thus far, and no farther." That is their great sin: they try to strangle the life out of Life. "

― John Wyndham , The Chrysalids

18 " Wszedł ojciec.
- Złapali ich. Całą trójkę – powiedział do inspektora i spojrzał na mnie z odrazą.
Inspektor natychmiast wstał i wyszli razem. Wpatrywałem się w zamknięte drzwi. Ból samonagany przenikną mnie tak, że cały się zatrząsałem. Słyszałem własne jęki i łzy spływały mi po policzkach. Usiłowałem je powstrzymać, ale nie mogłem. Zapomniałem o bolących plecach. Udręka wieści, którą przyniósł ojciec, była o wiele bardziej bolesna. Czułem taki ucisk w piersiach, że się dusiłem. "

― John Wyndham , The Chrysalids

20 " In my experience,' he told me, 'if you run away from a thing just because you don't like it, you don't like what you find either. Now, running to a thing, that's a different matter, but what would you want to run to? "

― John Wyndham , The Chrysalids