The Chrysalids Quotes

“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

“If you run away from a thing just because you don't like it, you don't like what you find either.”
― John Wyndham, The Chrysalids

“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

“Why should I? I've done nothing to be ashamed of. I am not ashamed - I am only beaten”
― John Wyndham, The Chrysalids

“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

“I shall pray to God to send charity to this hideous world, and sympathy for the weak, and love for the unhappy and unfortunate. I shall ask Him if is indeed His will that a child should suffer and its soul be damned for a little blemish on the body....And I shall pray Him, too, that the hearts of the self-righteous may be broken... ”
― John Wyndham, The Chrysalids

“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

“There was often a great deal of grown-up fuss that seemed disproportionate to causes.”
― John Wyndham, The Chrysalids

“... the more complex they made their world, the less capable they were of dealing with it. They had no means of consensus. They learnt to co-operate constructively in small units; but only destructively in large units. They aspired greedily, and then refused to face the responsibilities they had created. They created vast problems, and then buried their heads in the sands of idle faith.”
― John Wyndham, The Chrysalids

“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

“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

“Your work is to survive. Neither his kind, nor his kind of thinking will survive long. 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. Who, then, were the recent lords of creation, that they should expect to remain unchanged?”
― John Wyndham, The Chrysalids

“The Old People brought down Tribulation, and were broken into fragments by it. Your father and his kind are a part of those fragments. They have become history without being aware of it. They are determined still that there is a final form to defend: soon they will attain the stability they strive for, in the only form it is granted—a place among the fossils.”
― John Wyndham, The Chrysalids

“The definition of Man recited itself in my head...
And God created man in His own image. And God decreed that man should have one body, one head, two arms and two legs: that each arm should be joined in two places and end in one hand: that each hand should have four fingers and one thumb: that each finger should bear a flat finger-nail...Then God created woman, also, in the same image, but with these differences, according to her nature: her voice would be of higher pitch than man's: she should grow no beard: she should have two breasts...
And any creature that shall seem to be human, but is not formed thus is not human. It is neither man, nor woman. It is a blasphemy against the true image of God, and hateful in the sight of God.”
― John Wyndham, The Chrysalids

“We've got to believe that God is sane, Davie boy. We'd be lost indeed if we didn't do that.”
― John Wyndham, The Chrysalids

“They haven't God's word like they thought: God doesn't have any last word. If He did He'd be dead. But He isn't dead; and He changes and grows, like everything else that's alive”
― John Wyndham, The Chrysalids

“The only sounds in the cave were the hopeless, abandoned sobbing, and plop-plop-plop of the drips.

Petra looked at us, then at the figure on the bed, then at us again, expectantly. When neither of us moved she appeared to decide that the initiative lay with her. She crossed to the bedside and knelt down concernedly beside it. Tentatively she put a hand on the dark hair.

'Don't,' she said. 'Please don't.'

There was a startled catch in the sobbing. A pause, then a brown arm reached out round Petra's shoulders. The sound became a little less desolate ... it no longer tore at one's heart: but it left it
bruised and aching..”
― John Wyndham, The Chrysalids

“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

“Sophie dear,' I said. 'Are you in love with him - with this spider-man?'

'Oh, don't call him that - please - we can't any of us help being what we are. His name's Gordon. He's kind to me, David. He's fond of me. You've got to have as little as I have to know how much that means. You've never known loneliness. You can't understand the awful emptiness that's waiting all round us here. I'd have given him babies gladly, if I could. ... I - oh, why do they do that to us? Why didn't they kill me? It would have been kinder than this...'

She sat without a sound. The tears squeezed out from under the closed lids and ran down her face. I took her hand between my own.
I remembered watching. The man with his arm linked in the woman's, the small figure on top of the pack-horse waving back to me as they disappeared into the trees. Myself desolate, a kiss still damp on my
cheek, a lock tied with a yellow ribbon in my hand. I looked at her now, and my heart ached.”
― John Wyndham, The Chrysalids

“But when people are used to believing a thing is such-and-such a way, and the preachers want them to believe that that's the way it is; it's trouble you get, not thanks, for upsetting their ideas.”
― John Wyndham, The Chrysalids

“The alternative is the sword over your heads,' he said. 'I know,' I agreed unhappily. 'But that isn't the way. A sword inside us would be worse.”
― John Wyndham, The Chrysalids

“Suspicion insulated one curiously little against the shock of knowledge.”
― John Wyndham, THE CHRYSALIDS

“I told you all this so that you understand that if someone says that something is so, that does not prove that it is so.”
― John Wyndham, The Chrysalids

“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

“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

“seem to”
― John Wyndham, The Chrysalids

“There was the power of gods in the hands of children, we know: but were they mad children, all of them quite mad? . . . The mountains are cinders and”
― John Wyndham, THE CHRYSALIDS

“But the world is round so there must be another way to get there.”
― John Wyndham, The Chrysalids

“It is not at all pleasant to kill a living thing, but if we pretend that we can continue life without killing we would be nothing but hypocrites.”
― John Wyndham, The Chrysalids

“A world where a man is able to hunt his fellow man! How could he be called a man?”
― John Wyndham, The Chrysalids