Hg Wells The Invisible Man Quotes

All men, however highly educated, retain some superstitious inklings.

Alone-- it is wonderful how little a man can do alone! To rob a little, to hurt a little, and there is the end.

I went over the heads of the things a man reckons desirable. No doubt invisibility made it possible to get them, but it made it impossible to enjoy them when they are got.

The Anglo-Saxon genius for parliamentary government asserted itself; there was a great deal of talk and no decisive action.

I never blame anyone," said Kemp. "It's quite out of fashion.

But giving drugs to a cat is no joke, Kemp!

...the voice was indisputable. It continued to swear with that breadth and variety that distinguishes the swearing of a cultivated man.

Everyone seemed eager to talk at once, and the result was Babel.

Very well," said the Voice, in a tone of relief. "Then I'm going to throw flints at you till you think differently.

I felt amazingly confident,—it’s not particularly pleasant recalling that I was an ass.

Great and strange ideas transcending experience often have less effect upon men and women than smaller, more tangible considerations.

Ambition—what is the good of pride of place when you cannot appear there? What is the good of the love of woman when her name must needs be Delilah?

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 I saw none. You have only to think! And I, a shabby, poverty-struck, hemmed-in demonstrator, teaching fools in a provincial college, might suddenly become—this.

The stranger swore briefly but vividly.

In the middle of the night she woke up dreaming of huge white heads like turnips, that came trailing after her, at the end of interminable necks, and with vast black eyes. But being a sensible woman, she subdued her terrors and turned over and went to sleep again.

The stranger came early in February, one wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking from Bramblehurst railway station, and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand.

There’s some ex-traordinary things in books,” said the mariner.

In the night, he must have eaten and slept; for in the morning he was himself again, active, powerful, angry, and malignant, prepared for his last great struggle against the world.

I have wasted strength, time, opportunities. Alone — it is wonderful how little a man can do alone! To rob a little, to hurt a little, and there is the end.

I thought I was killing myself and I did not care.

I wish you'd keep your fingers out of my eye," said the aerial voice, in a tone of savage expostulation. "The fact is, I'm all here:head, hands, legs, and all the rest of it, but it happens I'm invisible. It's a confounded nuisance, but I am. That's no reason why I should be poked to pieces by every stupid bumpkin in Iping, is it?

He lit the dining-room lamp, got out a cigar, and began pacing the room, ejaculating.

The stranger came early in February, one wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking as it seemed from Bramblehurst railway station, and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand. He was wrapped up from head to foot, and the brim of his soft felt hat hid every inch of his face but the shiny tip of his nose; the snow had piled itself against his shoulders and chest, and added a white crest to the burden he carried. He staggered into the Coarch and Horses, more dead than alive as it seemed, and flung his portmanteau down. "A fire," he cried, "in the name of human charity! A room and a fire!" He stamped and shook the snow from off himself in the bar, and followed Mrs. Hall into her guest parlour to strike his bargain. And with that much introduction, that and a ready acquiescence to terms and a couple of sovereigns flung upon the table, he took up his quarters in the inn.

The man’s become inhuman, I tell you,” said Kemp. “I am as sure he will establish a reign of terror — so soon as he has got over the emotions of this escape — as I am sure I am talking to you. Our only chance is to be ahead. He has cut himself off from his kind. His blood be upon his own head.

My mood, I say, was one of exaltation. I felt as a seeing man might do, with padded feet and noiseless clothes, in a city of the blind. I experienced a wild impulse to jest, to startle people, to clap men on the back, fling people’s hats astray, and generally revel in my extraordinary advantage.

Every conceivable sort of silly creature that has ever been created has been sent to cross me.

This is day one of year one of the new epoch, -- the Epoch of the Invisible Man. I am Invisible Man the First.

And being but two-and-twenty and full of enthusiasm, I said, ‘I will devote my life to this. This is worth while.’ You know what fools we are at two-and-twenty?

Strychnine is a grand tonic, Kemp, to take the flabbiness out of a man.

I am just a human being — solid, needing food and drink, needing covering too — But I’m invisible. You see? Invisible. Simple idea. Invisible.

Kemp: I demonstrated conclusively this morning that invisibility-- I.M: Never mind what YOU'VE DEMONSTRATED!--I'm starving, said the voice, and the night is--chilly for a man without clothes.

I was invisible, and I was only just beginning to realise the extraordinary advantage my invisibility gave me. My head was already teeming with plans of all the wild and wonderful things I had now impunity to do.

He extended his hand: It seemed to meet something in mid-air, and he drew it back with a sharp exclamation. "I wish you'd keep your fingers out of my eye," said the aerial voice, in a tone of savage expostulation.

He is mad,” said Kemp; “inhuman. He is pure selfishness. He thinks of nothing but his own advantage, his own safety. I have listened to such a story this morning of brutal self-seeking…. He has wounded men. He will kill them unless we can prevent him. He will create a panic. Nothing can stop him. He is going out now — furious!

And there it was, on a shabby bed in a tawdry, ill-lighted bedroom, surrounded by a crowd of ignorant and excited people, broken and wounded, betrayed and unpitied, that Griffin, the first of all men to make himself invisible, Griffin, the most gifted physicist the world has ever seen, ended in infinite disaster his strange and terrible career.

Sometimes I think that this whole thing, this whole business of a world that keeps waking itself up and bothering to go on every day, is necessary only as a manifestation of the intolerable. The intolerable is like H.G. Wells's invisible man, it has to put on clothes in order to be seen. So it dresses itself up in a world. Possibly it looks in a mirror but my imagination doesn't go that far.

He was certainly an intensely egotistical and unfeeling man, but the sight of his victim, his first victim, bloody and pitiful at his feet, may have released some long pent fountain of remorse which for a time may have flooded whatever scheme of action he had contrived.

Something—exactly like a finger and thumb it felt—nipped my nose.

Bless my soul alive!

A door onbust is always open to bustin’, but ye can’t onbust a door once you’ve busted en.

That won’t do,” said the policeman; “that’s murder.” “I know what country I’m in,” said the man with the beard. “I’m going to let off at his legs. Draw the bolts.

An invisible man is a man with power.

So it was that on the twenty-ninth day of February, at the beginning of the thaw, this singular person fell out of infinity into Iping Village.

A fire,” he cried, “in the name of human charity! A room and a fire!

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.

For the man who stood there shouting some incoherent explanation, was a solid gesticulating figure up to the coat-collar of him, and then — nothingness, no visible thing at all!

Help me — and I will do great things for you. An invisible man is a man of power.” He

It’s a beast of a country,” said the Voice. “And pigs for people.

It continued to swear with that breadth and variety that distinguishes the swearing of a cultivated man.

I did not feel then that I was lonely, that I had come out from the world into a desolate place. I appreciated my loss of sympathy, but I put it down to the general inanity of things.

asked Kemp. “Three or four hours—the cat. The bones and sinews and the fat were the last to go, and the tips of the coloured hairs. And, as I say, the back part of the eye, tough, iridescent

Oliver, my professor, was a scientific bounder, a journalist by instinct, a thief of ideas,—he was always prying! And you know the knavish system of the scientific world. I simply would not publish, and let him share my credit. I went on working, I got nearer and nearer making my formula into an experiment, a reality. I told no living soul, because I meant to flash my work upon the world with crushing effect and become famous at a blow. I took up the question of pigments to fill up certain gaps. And suddenly, not by design but by accident, I made a discovery in physiology.

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

Another of those fools,” said Dr. Kemp. “Like that ass who ran into me this morning round a corner, with the ‘’Visible Man a-coming, sir!’ I can’t imagine what possess people. One might think we were in the thirteenth century.

He seemed under a chronic irritation of the greatest intensity. His habit of talking to himself in a low voice grew steadily upon him, but though Mrs. Hall listened conscientiously she could make neither head nor tail of what she heard.

Herbert George Wells, better known as H. G. Wells, was an English writer best known for such science fiction novels as The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man and The Island of Doctor Moreau. He was a prolific writer of both fiction and non-fiction, and produced works in many different genres, including contemporary novels, history, and social commentary. He was also an outspoken socialist. His later works become increasingly political and didactic, and only his early science fiction novels are widely read today. Wells, along with Hugo Gernsback and Jules Verne, is sometimes referred to as "The Father of Science Fiction". Source: Wikipedia

But you begin now to realise,” said the Invisible Man, “the full disadvantage of my condition. I had no shelter — no covering — to get clothing was to forego all my advantage, to make myself a strange and terrible thing. I was fasting; for to eat, to fill myself with unassimilated matter, would be to become grotesquely visible again.

The stranger came early in February, one wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking from Bramblehurst railway station, and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand. He was wrapped up from head to foot, and the brim of his soft felt hat hid every inch of his face but the shiny tip of his nose;

Forthwith flashes of actual flame, a bright glare leaping from one to another, sprang from the scattered group of men. It was as if some invisible jet impinged upon them and flashed into white flame. It was as if each man were suddenly and momentarily turned to fire. Then, by the light of their own destruction, I saw them staggering and falling, and their supporters turning to run.

The stranger did not go to church, and indeed made no difference between Sunday and the irreligious days, even in costume. He worked, as Mrs. Hall thought, very fitfully. Some days he would come down early and be continuously busy. On others he would rise late, pace his room, fretting audibly for hours together, smoke, sleep in the armchair by the fire. Communication with the world beyond the village he had none. His temper continued very uncertain; for the most part his manner was that of a man suffering under almost unendurable provocation, and once or twice things were snapped, torn, crushed, or broken in spasmodic gusts of violence. He seemed under a chronic irritation of the greatest intensity. His habit of talking to himself in a low voice grew steadily upon him, but though Mrs. Hall listened conscientiously she could make neither head nor tail of what she heard.

Another school of opinion followed Mr. Fearenside, and either accepted the piebald view or some modification of it; as, for instance, Silas Durgan, who was heard to assert that “if he chooses to show enself at fairs he’d make his fortune in no time,” and being a bit of a theologian, compared the stranger to the man with the one talent. Yet another view explained the entire matter by regarding the stranger as a harmless lunatic. That had the advantage of accounting for everything straight away. Between

The visitor sat and listened to her retreating feet. He glanced inquiringly at the window before he removed his serviette, and resumed his meal. He took a mouthful, glanced suspiciously at the window, took another mouthful, then rose and, taking the serviette in his hand, walked across the room and pulled the blind down to the top of the white muslin that obscured the lower panes. This left the room in a twilight. This done, he returned with an easier air to the table and his meal. “The poor soul’s had an accident or an operation

In fact, there is one theory that states that dark matter, an invisible form of matter that surrounds the galaxy, might be ordinary matter floating in a parallel universe. As in H.G. Wells's novel The Invisible Man, a person would become invisible if he floated just above us in the fourth dimension. Imagine two parallel sheets of paper, with someone floating on one sheet, just above the other. In the same way there is speculation that dark matter might be an ordinary galaxy hovering above us in another membrane universe. We could feel the gravity of this galaxy, since gravity can ooze its way between universes, but the other galaxy would be invisible to us because light moves underneath the galaxy. In this way, the galaxy would have gravity but would be invisible, which fits the description of dark matter. (Yet another possibility is that dark matter might consist of the next vibration of the superstring. Everything we see around us, such as atoms and light, is nothing but the lowest vibration of the superstring. Dark matter might be the next higher set of vibrations.)

The stranger went into the little parlour of the Coach and Horses about half-past five in the morning, and there he remained until near midday, the blinds down, the door shut, and none, after Hall’s repulse, venturing near him. All that time he must have fasted. Thrice he rang his bell, the third time furiously and continuously, but no one answered him. “Him and his ‘go to the devil’ indeed!” said Mrs. Hall. Presently came an imperfect rumour of the burglary at the vicarage, and two and two were put together. Hall, assisted by Wadgers, went off to find Mr. Shuckleforth, the magistrate, and take his advice. No one ventured upstairs. How the stranger occupied

In the early evening time Dr. Kemp was sitting in his study in the belvedere on the hill overlooking Burdock. It was a pleasant little room, with three windows—north, west, and south—and bookshelves covered with books and scientific publications, and a broad writing-table, and, under the north window, a microscope, glass slips, minute instruments, some cultures, and scattered bottles of reagents. Dr. Kemp's solar lamp was lit, albeit the sky was still bright with the sunset light, and his blinds were up because there was no offence of peering outsiders to require them pulled down. Dr. Kemp was a tall and slender young man, with flaxen hair and a moustache almost white, and the work he was upon would earn him, he hoped, the fellowship of the Royal Society, so highly did he think of it.

Then he removed his spectacles, and everyone in the bar gasped. He took off his hat, and with a violent gesture tore at his whiskers and bandages. For a moment they resisted him. A flash of horrible anticipation passed through the bar. "Oh, my Gard!" said some one. Then off they came. It was worse than anything. Mrs. Hall, standing open-mouthed and horror-struck, shrieked at what she saw, and made for the door of the house. Everyone began to move. They were prepared for scars, disfigurements, tangible horrors, but nothing! The bandages and false hair flew across the passage into the bar, making a hobbledehoy jump to avoid them. Everyone tumbled on everyone else down the steps. For the man who stood there shouting some incoherent explanation, was a solid gesticulating figure up to the coat-collar of him, and then—nothingness, no visible thing at all!

If the weakness of mainstream fiction is its deliberate smallness, the weakness of sf is its puffed-up size, its gauzy immensities. SF often pays so much attention to cosmic ideas that the story's surface is vague. Too much sf suffers from a lack of tangible reality. Muzzy settings, generic characters concocted merely for the sake of the idea, improbable action plots tidily wrapped up at the end. Too much preaching, not enough concrete, credible detail. An sf writer can get published without mastering certain things that most mainstream writers can’t evade: evocative prose style, naturalistic dialogue, attention to detail. Refraining from editorializing, over-explaining, or pat resolutions. To us, the contents of The Best American Short Stories seem paltry and timebound. To them, the contents of Asimov’s are overblown and underrealized. It’s no wonder that sf never makes the Ravenel collection. SF is habitually strong in areas considered unessential to good mainstream fiction, and weak in those areas that are considered essential. It doesn't matter that to the sf reader most contemporary fiction is so interested in "how things really are" in tight focus that it missed "how things really are" in the big picture. SF’s different standards make it invisible to mainstream readers, not in the literal way of H.G. Wells's invisible man, but in the cultural way of Ralph Ellison's. It's not that they can’t see us, it's that they don't know what to make of what they see. What they don't know about sf, and worse still, what they think they do know, make it impossible for them to appreciate our virtues. We are like a Harlem poet attempting to find a seat at the Algonquin round table in 1925. Our clothes are outlandish . Our accent is uncouth. The subjects we are interested in are uninteresting or incomprehensible. Our history and culture are unknown. Our reasons for being there are inadmissible. The result is embarrassment, condescension, or silence.

Griffin contra mundum… with a vengeance.

floor.

That afternoon it seemed all disappointment. I went over the heads of the things a man reckons desirable. No doubt invisibility made it possible to get them, but it made it impossible to enjoy them when they are got. Ambition—what is the good of pride of place when you cannot appear there? What is the good of the love of woman when her name must needs be Delilah? I have no taste for politics, for the blackguardisms of fame, for philanthropy, for sport. What was I to do? And for this I had become a wrapped-up mystery, a swathed and bandaged caricature of a man!

His irritability, though it might have been comprehensible to an urban brain-worker, was an amazing thing to these quiet Sussex villagers.

In each case, the energy of the emerging protons was only consistent with them having been ejected by a massive neutral particle. Rutherford compared this to H.G. Wells’ invisible man: although you could not see him directly, his presence could be detected when he collided with people in the crowd.

emboldened by drink, he shuffled over to the disguise with a penguin-like gait.

up to him. And yet his first “special” case had consisted of hunting down a yokel wearing an assortment of animal skins. Not to mention falling in love with

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 I saw none." - The Invisible Man

You think I’m just imagination? Just imagination?” “What else can you be?” said Mr. Thomas Marvel, rubbing the back of his neck. “Very well,” said the Voice, in a tone of relief. “Then I’m going to throw flints at you till you think differently.

much to say and little to tell,

Then he continued to pace the dining-room until the morning’s paper came. That had much to say and little to tell,

The stranger stood looking more like an angry driving-helmet than ever

All these — the sort of people that lived in these houses, and all those damn little clerks that used to live down that way — they’d be no good. They haven’t any spirit in them — no proud dreams and no proud lusts; and a man who hasn’t one or the other — Lord! What is he but funk and precautions? They just used to skedaddle off to work — I’ve seen hundreds of ‘em, bit of breakfast in hand, running wild and shining to catch their little season-ticket train, for fear they’d get dismissed if they didn’t; working at businesses they were afraid to take the trouble to understand; skedaddling back for fear they wouldn’t be in time for dinner; keeping indoors after dinner for fear of the back streets, and sleeping with the wives they married, not because they wanted them,

Sembra che tutte le creature più stupide che la natura ha abortito, abbiano fatto a gara per finirmi tra i piedi. [...] Sono riusciti a rendermi la vita mille volte più complicata.

Ogni uomo, per quanto istruito e colto possa essere, conserva sempre un fondo di superstizione.

La sua irritabilità, che avrebbe potuto risultare comprensibile ad un intellettuale di città, appariva invece molto strana a quei pacifici paesani del Sussex.

and when

I feel as though the animal was surging up through them; that presently the degradation of the Islanders will be played over again on a larger scale.

I’m an Invisible Man. It’s no foolishness, and no magic. I really am an Invisible Man. And I want your help. I don’t want to hurt you, but if you behave like a frantic rustic, I must. Don’t you remember me, Kemp? Griffin, of University College?” “Let me get up,” said Kemp. “I’ll stop where I am. And let me sit quiet for a minute.” He sat up and felt his neck. “I am Griffin, of University College, and I have made myself invisible. I am just an ordinary man — a man you have known — made invisible.

I'm an Invisible Man. It's no foolishness, and no magic. I really am an Invisible Man. And I want your help. I don't want to hurt you, but if you behave like a frantic rustic, I must. Don't you remember me, Kemp? Griffin, of University College?" "Let me get up," said Kemp. "I'll stop where I am. And let me sit quiet for a minute." He sat up and felt his neck. "I am Griffin, of University College, and I have made myself invisible. I am just an ordinary man—a man you have known—made invisible.

I’m an invisible man. It’s no foolishness, and no magic. I really am an invisible man. And I want your help. I don’t want to hurt you, but if you behave like a frantic rustic, I must. Don’t you remember me, Kemp? Griffin, of University College?” “Let me get up,” said Kemp. “I’ll stop where I am. And let me sit quiet for a minute.” He sat up and felt his neck. “I am Griffin, of University College, and I have made myself invisible. I am just an ordinary man—a man you have known—made invisible.

But consider, visibility depends on the action of the visible bodies on light. Either a body absorbs light, or it reflects or refracts it, or does all these things. If it neither reflects nor refracts nor absorbs light, it cannot of itself be visible. You see an opaque red box, for instance, because the colour absorbs some of the light and reflects the rest, all the red part of the light, to you. If it did not absorb any particular part of the light, but reflected it all, then it would be a shining white box. Silver! A diamond box would neither absorb much of the light nor reflect much from the general surface, but just here and there where the surfaces were favourable the light would be reflected and refracted, so that you would get a brilliant appearance of flashing reflections and translucencies—a sort of skeleton of light. A glass box would not be so brilliant, nor so clearly visible, as a diamond box, because there would be less refraction and reflection. See that? From certain points of view you would see quite clearly through it. Some kinds of glass would be more visible than others, a box of flint glass would be brighter than a box of ordinary window glass. A box of very thin common glass would be hard to see in a bad light, because it would absorb hardly any light and refract and reflect very little. And if you put a sheet of common white glass in water, still more if you put it in some denser liquid than water, it would vanish almost altogether, because light passing from water to glass is only slightly refracted or reflected or indeed affected in any way. It is almost as invisible as a jet of coal gas or hydrogen is in air. And for precisely the same reason!

parlour and began to lay them with the utmost éclat.

bush side-whisker over his coat-collar that completely hid his cheeks and face.

The stranger came early in February, one wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking from Bramblehurst railway station, and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand. He was wrapped up from head to foot, and the brim of his soft felt hat hid every inch of his face but the shiny tip of his nose; the snow had piled itself against his shoulders and chest, and added a white crest to the burden he carried.

navvies

This announces the first day of the Terror. Port Burdock is no longer under the Queen, tell your Colonel of Police, and the rest of them; it is under me—the Terror! This is day one of year one of the new epoch—the Epoch of the Invisible Man. I am Invisible Man the First.

Did he really sleep last night? Out in the open somewhere—secure from collisions.

The girl stared towards the kitchen, shuddered, and retreated into the dining-room.

it is wonderful how little a man can do alone! To rob a little, to hurt a little, and there is the end.

The stranger came early in February, one wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking from Bramblehurst railway station, and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand. He was wrapped up from head to foot, and the brim of his soft felt hat hid every inch of his face but the shiny tip of his nose; the snow had piled itself against his shoulders and chest, and added a white crest to the burden he carried. He staggered into the “Coach and Horses” more dead than alive, and flung his portmanteau down. “A fire,” he cried, “in the name of human charity! A room and a fire!” He stamped and shook the snow from off himself in the bar, and followed Mrs. Hall into her guest parlour to strike his bargain. And with that much introduction, that and a couple of sovereigns flung upon the table, he took up his quarters in the inn.

the etiolated pallor followed naturally enough.