The Chrysalids (orignal version)

by John Wyndham

But a woman who is in love is a different proposition. She lives in a world where all the old perspectives have altered. She is blinkered, single-purposed, undependable in other matters. She will sacrifice anything, including herself, to one loyalty.

God's little game of patience I reckon it is, but He certainly takes His time over it.'

Had ideals, they did; knew just how the world ought to be run. All they had to do was get it fixed up comfortable, and keep it that way; then everybody'd be fine, on account of their ideas being a lot more civilized

than God's.

They weren't God's last word like they thought: God doesn't have any last word. If He did He'd be dead.

He sent along Tribulation to bust it up and remind 'em that life is change.

He saw it wasn't going to come out the way things lay, so He shuffled the pack to see if it wouldn't give a better break next time.'

Tribulation was a shake-up to give us a new start.'

"thus far, and no farther."

Lines do need to be drawn. Many of the old rules carry a lot of wisdom. Old doesn't necessarily mean invalid.

There was an air about the last few sentences, rather out of keeping with the rest, which caused me to suspect I had encountered some kind of creed once more.

we do know that we can make a better world than the Old People did.

the more complex they made their world, the less capable they were of dealing with it.

It occurred to me again that these Sealanders had no little opinion of themselves. To one brought up as I had been this irreverence for the Old People was difficult to take.

They see no pros to the old situation, and no cons to the new one.

The idea of completed man is the supreme vanity: the finished image is a sacrilegious myth.

It is not pleasant to kill any creature,' she agreed, ' but to pretend that one can live without doing so is self-deception. There has to be meat in the dish, there have to be vegetables forbidden to flower,

And just as we have to keep ourselves alive in these ways, so, too, we have to preserve our species against other species that wish to destroy it - or else fail in our trust.

We shall try with all our strength to grind it back into the earth from which it is emerging, for treachery to one's own species must always seem a crime. We shall force it to prove itself, and when it does, we shall go;

'In loyalty to their kind they cannot tolerate our rise; in loyalty to our kind, we cannot tolerate their obstruction.

They can see quite well that if it is to survive they have not only to preserve it from deterioration, but they must protect it from the even more serious threat of the superior variant.

we could never commit the enormity of imagining that we could mint ourselves into equality and identity, like stamped coins; we do not mechanistically attempt to hammer ourselves into geometrical patterns of society, or policy; we are not dogmatists teaching God how He should have ordered the world.