And in friendship and still more here, in this central business of love, accident rules it seems to me almost altogether. What personalities you will encounter in life, and have for a chief interest in life, is nearly as much a matter of chance as the drift of a grain of pollen in the pine forest. And once the light hazard has blown it has blown, never to drive again.
And you cannot move at all in Time, you cannot get away from the present moment.
You may kill me, but I can hold you – and all the universe for that matter – in the grip of this small brain. I would not change. Even now.
Language is the nourishment of the thought of man, that serves only as it undergoes metabolism, and becomes thought and lives, and in its very living passes away. You scientific people, with your fancy of a terrible exactitude in language, of indestructible foundations built, as that Wordsworthian doggerel on the title-page of Nature says, “for aye,” are marvellously without imagination!
I had not, I said to myself, come into the future to carry on a miniature flirtation.
So long as there are sheep Nature will insist on beasts of prey.
A douche of spray blinded my brother for a moment.
There was no amazement, but only an impression of delightful rightness, of being reminded of happy things that had in some strange way been overlooked.
All we can do is to prepare for a universal language that will go on changing for ever. We don’t know everything. We aren’t final. I wish we could make that statement a part of the Fundamental Law.
Have a good look at the thing. Look at the table too, and satisfy yourselves there is no trickery. I don’t want to waste this model, and then be told I’m a quack.
It was a red-flannel chest-protector, one of those large quasi-hygienic objects that with pills and medicines take the place of beneficial relics and images among the Protestant peoples of Christendom.
Think of what earthquakes and floods, wars and volcanoes, have done before men! Did you think God had exempted Weybridge? He is not an insurance agent.
I suppose I am fairly alert and interested in people, and that is my most attractive quality.
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.
Let’s be sure we’d be acting perfectly right in bustin’ that there door open. A door onbust is always open to bustin’, but ye can’t onbust a door once you’ve busted en.
Go to the devil!” said the stranger in a tremendous voice, and “Shut that door after you.” So that brief interview terminated.
You know how on a flat surface, which has only two dimensions, we can represent a figure of a three-dimensional solid, and similarly they think that by models of three dimensions they could represent one of four – if they could master the perspective of the thing.
I do not know if hell is hot or cold, or what sort of place hell may be, but this I surely know, that if there is any hell at all it will be badly lit. And it will taste like a train.
I surveyed the broad view of our old world under the sunset of that long day.
Have you been time travelling?