The body - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

The Martians may be descended from beings not unlike ourselves, by a gradual development of brain and hands (the latter giving rise to the two bunches of delicate tentacles at last) at the expense of the rest of the body. Without the body the brain would of course become a more selfish intelligence, without any of the emotional substratum of the human being.

- H. G.Wells, TheWar of theWorlds (1898)

There are so many disadvantages in human construction which do not occur in us machines. [. . .] Some little thing here or there breaks - they stop working and then, in a short time, they are decomposing. Had he been a machine, like myself, I could have mended him, replaced the broken parts and made him as good as new, but with these animal structures one is almost helpless.

- JohnWyndham, ''The Lost Machine'' (1932)

The human heart is more complex than any other part of the body.

- William Hurlbut, Bride of Frankenstein (film, 1935)

You must admit that it might be confusing to have one brain and two bodies.

- Edgar Rice Burroughs, Synthetic Men of Mars (1940)

I am still young and ill-formed, running to slenderness instead of to the corpulence that is the universal mark of beauty.

- James V. McConnell, ''All of You'' (1953)

Madge borrows a body once a month and dusts the place, though the only thing a house is good for now is keeping termites and mice from getting pneumonia.

- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., ''Unready toWear'' (1953)

The body, he reflected, possesses ways of its own, sometimes in contradistinction to the purposes of the mind.

- Philip K. Dick, Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964)

Within his body there throbbed the contributions of many a young Vorster volunteer: a film of lung tissue from one, a retina from another, kidneys from a pair of twins. He was a patchwork man, and he carried the flesh of his movement about with him.

- Robert Silverberg, ''Open the Sky'' (1966)

HarrisonWintergreen was inside his own body. It was a world of wonder and loathsomeness, of the majestic and the ludicrous.Wintergreen's point of view, which his mind analogized as a body within his true body, was inside a vast network of pulsing arteries, like some monstrous freeway system. The analogy crystallized. It was a freeway, and Wintergreen was driving down it. Bloated sacs dumped things into the teeming traffic: hormones, wastes, nutrients.White blood cells careened by him like mad taxicabs. Red corpuscles drove steadily along like stolid burghers. The traffic ebbed and congested like a crosstown rush hour. Wintergreen drove on, searching, searching.

- Norman Spinrad, ''Carcinoma Angels'' (1967)

Seagrave's slim and exhausted face was covered with shattered safety glass, as if his body were already crystallizing, at last escaping out of this uneasy set of dimensions into a more beautiful universe.

- J. G. Ballard, Crash (1973)

You're gaining weight finally. Thinness is dangerous.

- Octavia E. Butler, ''Bloodchild'' (1984)

The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh.

- William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)

Almost everything which corrupts the soul, must also decay the body.

- William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine (1991)

The molecules of your body are the same molecules that make up this station and the nebula outside, that burn inside the stars themselves.We are starstuff, we are the universe made manifest, trying to figure itself out.

- D. C. Fontana, ''A Distant Star,'' episode of Babylon 5 (1994)

I was nodding off on the streetcar home from work when I saw the woman getting on. She was wearing the body I used to have!

- Nalo Hopkinson, ''A Habit of Waste'' (1996)