The Chrysalids

by John Wyndham

‘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,

‘And, mind you, it doesn’t do to believe everything every sailor says either – and you’re often not sure whether any couple of them are talking about the same place or not, even when they think they are.

They keep their men in cages until they are about twenty-four years old, and then eat them. They also eat shipwrecked sailors. But as no one ever seems to have met anyone who has actually been there and escaped, it’s difficult to see how that can be known.

‘souls are just counters for churches to collect, all the same value, like nails. No, what makes man man is mind; it’s not a thing, it’s a quality, and minds aren’t all the same value; they’re better or worse, and the better they are, the more they mean.

It called for a lot of restraint to remain silent in the face of simple errors, to listen patiently to silly arguments based on misconceptions, to do a job in the customary way when one knew there was a better way …

I like this because it makes me think of my own work and industry whereby we, myself specifically included, will hold on to old ways of doing things and resist learning new ways.

Duration is nothing. Perhaps it was only for an instant we were together again. The importance of a point is in its existence; it has no dimensions.

They are the crown of creation, they are ambition fulfilled – they have nowhere more to go. But life is change, that is how it differs from the rocks, change is its very nature.

‘There is comfort in a mother’s breast, but there has to be a weaning. The attainment of independence, the severing of ties, is, at best, a bleak process for both sides;

‘The essential quality of life is living; the essential quality of living is change; change is evolution: and we are part of it. ‘The static, the enemy of change, is the enemy of life, and therefore our implacable enemy.