It was a dark world; it was full of preventable disorder, preventable diseases, and preventable pain, of harshness and stupid unpremeditated cruelties; but yet, it may be even by virtue of the general darkness, there were moments of a rare and evanescent…
Book 1906
In the Days of the Comet quotes
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About the book
Looking back from old age, Willie Leadford recalls his youth as a poor, angry clerk in an English industrial town, consumed by class resentment and jealous love while a bright green comet draws nearer to Earth. His story becomes a portrait of a whole society's muddle and hatred, and of what it might take for people to change.
6 quotes
Mr. Wiggins: It was a sort of stupid bitterness possessed us, and I can’t make out we didn’t see it before in that light. Not so much downright wickedness it wasn’t as stupidity. A stupid jealousy! Think of it!—two human beings within a stone’s throw, who…
The thing was, in fact, an enormous irrational obsession, it was, in the microcosm of our nation, curiously parallel to the egotistical wrath and jealousy that swayed my individual microcosm. It measured the excess of common emotion over the common…
Melmount: This muddle is too rotten to handle. We’re beginning again. Well, let us begin afresh.
In my memory all my life before the Change has the quality of a dark passage, with the dimmest side gleams of beauty that come and go. The rest is dull pain and darkness. Then suddenly the walls, the bitter confines, are smitten and vanish, and I walk…
Willie Leadford: I wish at times, … that comet of yours or some such thing would indeed strike this world—and wipe us all away, strikes, wars, tumults, loves, jealousies, and all the wretchedness of life!