How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
[Stormgren] had severed mankind for forty years, and its masters for five, and few men could look back upon a life that had seen so many of its ambitions achieved. Perhaps that was the trouble: in the years of retirement, however many they might be, he would have no further goals to give any zest to life. (3.1)
There are only two things certain about life in Childhood's End—the first is death, and the second is that life needs a purpose to add "zest" to it. Oh, and perhaps taxes. They're never mentioned in the book, but we're pretty certain they are still a part of life. So three things are certain, we guess.
Quote #2
"We have had our failures."
Yes, Karellen that was true: and were you the one who failed, before the dawn of human history? It must have been a failure indeed, thought Stormgren, for its echoes to roll down all the ages, to haunt the childhood of every race of man. (4.161-162)
Childhood's End is what you might call a big picture kind of novel. It's looking at the life and existence of the entire human race while occasionally peeping in on the personal lives and existences of individual people. As this quote shows, that big picture extends into the past, present, and future.
Quote #3
Production had become largely automatic: the robot factories poured forth consumer goods in such unending streams that all the ordinary necessities of life were virtually free. Men worked for the sake of the luxuries they desired: or they did not work at all. (6.18)
Thing about life in the future: It's way better than life in the past, by which we mean the now. Aircars? Yes, please. Of course, the good comes with the bad….
Quote #4
The end of strife and conflict of all kinds had also meant the virtual end of creative art. (6.35)
And here's the bad. With strife and conflict gone—both personal conflicts and larger ones like war—humanity lacks the means to create decent art in the form of books, movies, paintings and so on. Yes, you read that right: Childhood's End sees the downside of a war-free world.
Quote #5
[…], and George noticed for the first time that [Rashaverak] had two opposed thumbs, with five fingers between them. I'd hate to do arithmetic, George thought to himself, in a system based on fourteen. (7.52)
This is an odd little detail, but it's pretty interesting when you think about it. Just consider how much of our life and existence is based on the fact that every human in the world has ten fingers. Pretty neat, right?
Quote #6
"With your low gravity," answered Sullivan. "I should have thought you would have had some very large animals. After all, look how much bigger you are than us!"
"Yes—but we have no oceans. And where size is concerned, the land can never compete with the sea." (13.19-20)
Another little detail with some fascinating implications for this theme. Life on this planet has developed largely because of, well, the planet it developed on. It's another example of Childhood's End looking at that larger picture.
Quote #7
The nebula expanded. Now the individual stars were rushing past, appearing and vanishing as swiftly as sparks from a forge. And each of those transient sparks was a sun, with who knew how many circling worlds….
"In this galaxy of ours," murmured Karellen, "there are eighty-seven thousand million suns. Even that figure gives only a faint idea of the immensity of space. In challenging it, you would be like ants attempting to label and classify all the grains of sand in all the deserts of the world." (14.30-31)
The universe is big. Like really big. And compared to it, we're small. Like really small. But we owe our small existence to the evolution and interworking of that vast, mysterious place.
Quote #8
The decline had barely started, yet the first symptoms of decay were not hard to discover. Salomon was no artist, but he had an acute appreciation of art and knew that his age could not match the achievements of previous centuries in any single field. (15.48)
For Salomon, art is a necessary part of life—without it, life can keep on going, but it won't be worth living and it will lack the ability to grow into something new. As we'll see with the Overlords, Salomon is pretty spot on.
Quote #9
"It seems," said Karellen, "that you scientists have not been as thorough as you had believed. If those—patterns—are intelligent, the problem of communication will be interesting. I wonder if they have any knowledge of the third dimension?" (18.45)
The themes of science and life come together in this quote. The thing about both of these themes is that there is always something new to discover and learn.
Quote #10
For reasons the Overlords could not explain, but which Jan suspected were largely psychological, there had been no children to replace those who had gone. Homo sapiens was extinct. (23.49)
Another inescapable aspect of life present in Childhood's End is that life has to end, for individuals and species as a whole. It's not exactly the most uplifting part of the theme, but it's pretty accurate and important.