Chocky Quotes

Chocky is a playful investigation of what being human is all about, delving into such matters as child-rearing, marriage, learning, artistic inspiration—and it ends with a surprising and impassioned plea for better human stewardship of the earth.

Matthew, they thought, was just going through a phase of talking to himself. And, like many parents, they waited for him to get over it, but it started to get worse.

Mathew’s conversations with himself grew more and more intense - it was like listening to one end of a telephone conversation while someone argued, cajoled and reasoned with another person you couldn’t hear.

Matthew is twelve, and a completely normal child. Suddenly he starts asking unusual questions and behaving oddly. It is then that his parents become aware of Chocky.

“Chocky” reveals that it is a scout sent from its home planet (where there is only one sex) in search of new planets to colonise, or to provide subtle guidance to newly-emerging intelligent life.

It’s not terribly unusual for a boy to have an imaginary friend, but Matthew’s parents have to agree that his—nicknamed Chocky—is anything but ordinary.

When the questions Chocky asks become too advanced and, frankly, too odd for Matthew’s teachers to answer, his parents start to wonder if Chocky might be something far stranger than a figment of their son’s imagination.

Why, Chocky demands to know, are there twenty-four hours in a day? Why are there two sexes? Why can’t Matthew solve his math homework using a logical system like binary code?

Then Matthew started doing things he couldn’t do before, like counting in binary-code mathematics. So he told them about Chocky - the person who lived in his head.

David Gore becomes concerned that his twelve-year-old son, Matthew, is too old to have an imaginary friend. His concerns deepen as Matthew becomes increasingly distressed and blames it on arguments with this unseen companion, whom he calls “Chocky”.