Sentence No. 29 · 25 April 2026
There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
H.G. Wells — The Time Machine (1895) · Read it at Project Gutenberg
What holds this sentence together
The word "except" is the hinge of this sentence — everything before it states a bold equivalence, and "except" introduces the single qualification that limits it. When you see "except that," the clause after it always trails the main claim, never opens the sentence.
How it appears in Sentle
On Sentle this sentence arrives in 7 pieces, shuffled, with the lines that lead up to it for context. The Time Traveller explains to his dinner guests what he believes about the nature of time. Putting it back in the author’s order is the puzzle — and the order is rarely arbitrary, which is what the note above is about.
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