The First Men In The Moon Quotes
"As I sit down to write here amidst the shadows of vine-leaves under the blue sky of southern Italy, it comes to me with a certain quality of astonishment that my participation in these amazing adventures of Mr. Cavor was, after all, the outcome of the purest accident."
"So utterly at variance is destiny with all the little plans of men."
"Here, at any rate, I shall find peace and a chance to work!"
"One cannot always be magnificent, but simplicity is always a possible alternative."
"It's a fine idea, but it strikes me as a large order all the same."
"The object of Mr. Cavor's search was a substance that should be 'opaque'."
"One can imagine something worm-like, taking its air solid as an earth-worm swallows earth."
"Imagine it all lit by a blaze that would make the intensest sunlight of earth seem watery and weak."
"We might have done. Only one gets into habits of mind."
"They think I'm going to crawl about on my stomach--on my vertebrated stomach!"
"The earnest we have in that shaft, and those machines."
"Some rare sort of animal might comfort himself in that way while they were bringing him to the Zoo."
"Everybody believes that Cavor was a not very brilliant scientific experimenter."
"I'm forced almost, to be a little short and mysterious."
"I give you my word of honour I've come from the moon, and that's all I can tell you."
"All the same, I'm tremendously obliged to you, you know, tremendously."
"I hope that my manner hasn't in any way given you offence."
"I'm not equal to it! You must puzzle and--and be damned to you!"
"His announcement renewed attention to fact that had long been familiar to scientific people, namely: that from some unknown source in space, waves of electromagnetic disturbance, entirely similar those used by Signor Marconi for his wireless telegraphy, are constantly reaching the earth."
"Ever since 1898 he had devoted himself almost entirely to this subject, and being a man of ample means he had erected an observatory on the flanks of Monte Rosa, in a position singularly adapted in every way for such observations."
"My scientific attainments, I must admit, are not great, but so far as they enable me to judge, Mr. Wendigee's contrivances for detecting and recording any disturbances in the electromagnetic conditions of space are singularly original and ingenious."
"Consequently we have fragments of his communication even from the beginning. Unhappily, they are only fragments, and the most momentous of all the things that he had to tell humanity--the instructions, that is, for the making of Cavorite, if, indeed, he ever transmitted them--have throbbed themselves away unrecorded into space."
"He was unable to tell, therefore, what we had received or what we had missed; nor, indeed, did he certainly know that any one on earth was really aware of his efforts to reach us."
"This he was able to operate at irregular intervals: sometimes for only half an hour or so, sometimes for three or four hours at a stretch."
"It is well the reader should understand the conditions under which it would seem these messages were sent."
"The rocks about us were very various, sometimes black, sometimes pale blue and veined, and once they flashed and glittered as though we had come into a mine of sapphires."
"The caverns and passages are naturally very tortuous. A large proportion of these ways are known only to expert pilots among the fishermen."
"The lunar sea, says Cavor, in a later passage, is not a stagnant ocean; a solar tide sends it in a perpetual flow around the lunar axis, and strange storms and boilings and rushings of its waters occur."