The Time Machine

by

H. G. Wells

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Chapter 3 Quotes

What might appear when that hazy curtain was altogether withdrawn? What might not have happened to men? What if cruelty had grown into a common passion? What if in this interval the race had lost its manliness, and had developed into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful? I might seem some old-world savage animal, only the more dreadful and disgusting for our common likeness—a foul creature to be incontinently slain.

Related Characters: The Time Traveller (speaker)
Page Number: 24
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

Seeing the ease and security in which these people were living, I felt this close resemblance between the sexes was after all what one would expect; for the strength of a man and the softness of a woman, the institution of the family, and the differentiation of occupations are mere militant necessities of an age of physical force…

Related Characters: The Time Traveller (speaker), The Eloi
Page Number: 33
Explanation and Analysis:

Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness. The work of ameliorating the conditions of life—the true civilizing process that makes life more and more secure—had gone steadily on to a climax. One triumph of a united humanity over Nature had followed another. Things that are now mere dreams had become projects deliberately put in hand and carried forward. And the harvest was what I saw!

Related Characters: The Time Traveller (speaker), The Eloi
Page Number: 34
Explanation and Analysis:

Very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough—as most wrong theories are!

Related Characters: The Time Traveller (speaker)
Page Number: 38
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

To sit among all these unknown things before a puzzle like that is hopeless. That way lies monomania. Face this world. Learn its ways, watch it, be careful of too hasty guesses at its meaning. In the end you will find clues to it all.

Related Characters: The Time Traveller (speaker)
Page Number: 45
Explanation and Analysis:

For, by merely seeming fond of me, and showing in her weak, futile way that she cared for me, the little doll of a creature presently gave my return to the neighborhood of the White Sphinx almost the feeling of coming home.

Related Characters: The Time Traveller (speaker), Weena
Page Number: 50
Explanation and Analysis:

But gradually the truth dawned on me: that Man had not remained one species, but had differentiated into two distinct animals: that my graceful children of the Upper-world were not the sole descendants of our generation, but that this bleached, obscene, nocturnal Thing, which had flashed before me, was also heir to all the ages.

Related Characters: The Time Traveller (speaker), The Eloi, The Morlocks
Related Symbols: Light, Darkness, and Fire
Page Number: 54
Explanation and Analysis:

At first, proceeding from the problems of our own age, it seemed clear as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer, was the key to the whole position.

Related Characters: The Time Traveller (speaker), The Eloi, The Morlocks
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 56
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

The nemesis of the delicate ones was creeping on apace. Ages ago, thousands of generations ago, man had thrust his brother man out of the ease and the sunshine. And now that brother was coming back—changed! Already the Eloi had begun to learn one old lesson anew. They were becoming reacquainted with Fear.

Related Characters: The Time Traveller (speaker), The Eloi, The Morlocks
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 67
Explanation and Analysis:

Still, however helpless the little people in the presence of their mysterious Fear, I was differently constituted. I came out of this age of ours, this ripe prime of the human race, when Fear does not paralyse and mystery has lost its terrors.

Related Characters: The Time Traveller (speaker), The Eloi
Page Number: 67
Explanation and Analysis:

And during these few revolutions all the activity, all the traditions, the complex organizations, the nations, languages, literatures, aspirations, even the mere memory of Man as I knew him, had been swept out of existence. Instead were these frail creatures who had forgotten their high ancestry, and the white Things of which I went in terror.

Related Characters: The Time Traveller (speaker), The Eloi, The Morlocks
Page Number: 71
Explanation and Analysis:

Then I tried to preserve myself from the horror that was coming upon me by regarding it as a rigorous punishment of human selfishness. Man had been content to live in ease and delight upon the labours of his fellow-man, had taken Necessity as his watchword and excuse, and in the fullness of time Necessity had come home to him. I even tried a Carlyle-like scorn of this wretched aristocracy in decay. But this attitude of mind was impossible. However great their intellectual degradation, the Eloi had kept too much of the human form not to claim my sympathy, and to make me perforce a sharer in their degradation and their Fear.

Related Characters: The Time Traveller (speaker), The Eloi, The Morlocks
Page Number: 73
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

I saw an inscription in some unknown character. I thought, rather foolishly, that Weena might help me to interpret this, but I only learned that the bare idea of writing had never entered her head. She always seemed to me, I fancy, more human than she was, perhaps because her affection was so human.

Related Characters: The Time Traveller (speaker), Weena
Page Number: 74
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

I understood now what the beauty of the Over-world people covered. Very pleasant was their day, as pleasant as the day of the cattle in the field. Like the cattle, they knew of no enemies and provided against no needs. And their end was the same.

Related Characters: The Time Traveller (speaker), The Eloi
Related Symbols: Light, Darkness, and Fire
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 90
Explanation and Analysis:

It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers. So, as I see it, the Upper-world man had drifted towards his feeble prettiness, and the Under-world to mere mechanical industry.

Related Characters: The Time Traveller (speaker), The Eloi, The Morlocks
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 91
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

So I travelled, stopping ever and again, in great strides of a thousand years or more, drawn on by the mystery of the earth’s fate, watching with a strange fascination the sun grow larger and duller in the westward sky, and the life of the old earth ebb away.

Related Characters: The Time Traveller (speaker)
Page Number: 97
Explanation and Analysis:
Epilogue Quotes

Or did he go forward, into one of the nearer ages, in which men are still men, but with the riddles of our own time answered and its wearisome problems solved? Into the manhood of the race: for I, for my own part, cannot think that these latter days of weak experiment, fragmentary theory, and mutual discord are indeed man’s culminating time!

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Time Traveller
Page Number: 107
Explanation and Analysis:

And I have before me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers—shriveled now, and brown and flat and brittle—to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Eloi, Weena
Related Symbols: Weena’s Flowers
Page Number: 108
Explanation and Analysis:
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