For after the Battle comes quiet.

— H.G. Wells

For it is just this question of pain that parts us. So long as visible or audible pain turns you sick; so long as your own pains drive you; so long as pain underlies your propositions about sin, —so long, I tell you, you are an animal, thinking a little less obscurely what an animal feels.

— H.G. Wells

For that moment I touched an emotion beyond the common range of men, yet one the poor brutes we dominate know only too well. I felt as a rabbit might feel returning to his burrow, and suddenly confronted by the work of a dozen busy navvies digging the foundations of a house. I felt the first inkling of a thing that presently grew quite clear in my mind, that oppressed me for many days, a sense of dethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer master, but an animal among animals; under the Martian heel.

— H.G. Wells

For the most part people went about their business with an entirely irresponsible confidence in the stability of the universe.

— H.G. Wells

Given as much law as that man will be able to do anything and go anywhere, and the only trace of pessimism left in the human prospect today is a faint flavor that one was born so soon.

— H.G. Wells

…growing a little tiresome on account of some mysterious internal discomfort that the local practitioner diagnosed as imagination

— H.G. Wells

Had Moreau had any intelligible object, I could have sympathized at least a little with him. I am not so squeamish about pain as that. I could have forgiven him a little even, had his motive been only hate. But he was so irresponsible, so utterly careless! His curiosity, his mad, aimless investigations, drove him on; and the Things were thrown out to live a year or so, to struggle and blunder and suffer, and at last to die painfully.

— H.G. Wells

He began to realize that you cannot even fight happily with creatures that stand upon a different mental basis to yourself.

— H.G. Wells

He beheld in swift succession the incidents in the brief tale of his experience. His wretched home, his still more wretched school-days, the years of vicious life he had led since then, one act of selfish dishonor leading to another; it was all clear and pitiless now, all its squalid folly, in the cold light of the dawn. He came to the hut, to the fight with the Horror man, to the retreat down the river to Selma, to the Mend assassin and his red parcel, to his frantic endeavors to destroy the head, to the growth of his hallucination. It was a hallucination! He knew it was. A hallucination merely. For a moment he snatched at hope. He looked away from the glass, and on the bracket, the inverted head grinned and grimaced at him... With the stiff fingers of his bandaged hand he felt at his neck for the throb of his arteries. The morning was very cold, the steel blade felt like ice.("Pollock And The Portal Man")

— H.G. Wells

He blinked at the sun and dreamt that perhaps he might snare it and spare it as it went down to its resting place amidst the distant hills.

— H.G. Wells