"Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by…"

"Then she generated the light, and the sight of her room, flooded with radiance and studded with electric buttons, rev…"

"By her side, on the little reading-desk, was a survival from the ages of litter - one book. This was the Book of the …"

"Few travelled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over. Rapid inter…"

"'Beware of first- hand ideas!' exclaimed one of the most advanced of them. 'First-hand ideas do not really exist. The…"

"Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that re…"

"Those who had long worshipped silently, now began to talk. They described the strange feeling of peace that came over…"

"There came a day when over the whole world - in Sumatra, in Wessex, in the innumerable cities of Courland and Brazil …"

"The equivocal opening phrase, 'imagine, if you can', suggests that the capacity for imagination is already dwindling …"

""The Machine Stops" basically expresses the same ethical and social preoccupations that inform all the other works of…"