Clifford D. Simak quotes - page 2

... history turns on violence. It can be a bloody business. (Clifford D. Simak)
We said, there's another second gone, there's another minute and another hour and another day, when, as a matter of fact the second or the minute or the hour was never gone. It was the same one all the time. It had just moved along and we had moved with it.
Clifford D. Simak
Here lies one from a distant star, but the soil is not alien to him, for in death he belongs to the universe.
Clifford D. Simak
Once there had been joy, but now there was only sadness, and it was not, he knew, alone the sadness of an empty house; it was the sadness of all else, the sadness of the Earth, the sadness of the failures and the empty triumphs.
Clifford D. Simak
Could that have been what happened to the human race - a willing perversity that set at naught all human values which had been so hardly won and structured in the light of reason for a span of more than a million years?
Clifford D. Simak
There is a plan, it seems to me, that reaches out of the electron to the rim of the universe and what this plan may be or how it came about is beyond my feeble intellect. But if we are looking for something on which to pin our faith - and, indeed, our hope - the plan might well be it. I think we have thought too small and have been too afraid...
Clifford D. Simak
I had the feeling that this was a place, once seen, that could not be seen again. If I left and then came back, it would not be the same; no matter how many times I might return to this particular spot the place and feeling would never be the same, something would be lost or something would be added, and there never would exist again, through all eternity, all the integrated factors that made it what it was in this magic moment.
Clifford D. Simak
A wrongness persisted, a sense of aberration, some factor not quite right, the feeling of a corner. But Boone could not pin it down; there seemed no way to reach it.
Clifford D. Simak
Memory and dust, he thought, link us to the past.
Clifford D. Simak
And death was a soft thing, soft and black, cool and sweet and gracious. He slipped into it as a swimmer slips into the surf and it closed over him and held him and he felt the pulse and beat of it and knew the vastness and sureness of it.
Clifford D. Simak
Man was engaged in a mad scramble for power and knowledge, but nowhere is there any hint of what he meant to do with it once he had attained it. (Clifford D. Simak)
There were certain basic things, perhaps-the very earth, itself-which existed through every point in time, holding a sort of limited eternity to provide a solid matrix. And the dead-the dead and fabricated-stayed in the past as ghosts. The fence posts and the wire strung on them, the dead trees, the farm buildings, and the bridge were shadows of the present persisting in the past. Persisting, perhaps, reluctantly, because since they had no life they could not move along. They were bound in time and stretched through time and they were long, long shadows. He was, he realized with a shock, the only living thing existing in this moment on this earth. He and nothing else.
Clifford D. Simak
She always had been in touch with something outside of human ken. She had something in her no other human had. You sensed it, but you could not name it, for there was no name for this thing she had. And she had fumbled with it, trying to use it, not knowing how to use it, charming off the warts and healing poor hurt butterflies and only God knew what other acts that she performed unseen.
Clifford D. Simak
The impulse patterns which carried creatures star to star were almost instantaneous, no matter what the distance. He stood and thought about it and it still was hard, he admitted to himself, for a person to believe.
Clifford D. Simak
This is the core of the galaxy," Horseface said. "This is the very center of everything there is. A huge black hole eating up the galaxy. The end of everything.
Clifford D. Simak
There was a world of mutants, men and women who were more than normal men and women, persons who had certain human talents and certain human understandings which the normal men and women of the world had never known, or having known, could not utilize in their entirety, unable to use intelligently all the mighty powers which lay dormant in their brains.
Clifford D. Simak
What strange circumstances, or what odd combination of many circumstances, must occur, I wondered, to make it possible for a man to step from one world to another.
Clifford D. Simak
They sat for a moment, regarding one another; neither understanding. As if we were two aliens, thought Blaine. With viewpoints that did not come within a million miles of coinciding, and yet they both were men.
Clifford D. Simak
It is a net," said Horseface, "useful for the fishing of the universe." Enid crinkled up her face, staring at what he called a net. It was a flimsy thing and it had no shape. "Certainly," she said, "you would not go fishing the universe in so slight a thing as this." "Time means nothing to it," said Horseface, "nor does space. It is independent of both time and space except as it makes use of them.
Clifford D. Simak
Bit by bit, as the legend unfolds, the reader gets a more accurate picture of the human race. By degrees, one gains the conviction that here is a race which can be little more than pure fantasy. It is not the kind of race which could rise from humble beginnings to the eminence of culture with which it is gifted in these tales. Its equipment is too poor. So far it lack of stability has become apparent. Its preoccupation with a mechanical civilization rather than with a culture based on some of the sounder, more worthwhile concepts of life indicates a lack of basic character. And now, in this tale, we learn of the limited communications which it possessed, a situation which certainly is not conducive to advancement. Man's inability to understand and appreciate the thought and the viewpoint of another man would be a stumbling block which no amount of mechanical ability could overcome.
Clifford D. Simak
Beyond his own sure knowledge, he had not a shred of proof. (Clifford D. Simak)
What is a bow and arrow? It is the beginning of the end. It is the winding path that grows to the roaring road of war. It is a plaything and a weapon and a triumph in human engineering. It is the first faint stirring of an atom bomb. It is a symbol of a way of life.
Clifford D. Simak
Whatever doubt might rise, he knew that he was right. But the rightness was an intellectual rightness and the doubt emotional.
Clifford D. Simak
We thought all the time that we were passing through time when we really weren't, when we never have. We've just been moving along with time. We said, there's another second gone, there's another minute and another hour and another day, when, as a matter of fact the second or the minute or the hour was never gone. It was the same one all the time. It had just moved along and we had moved with it.
Clifford D. Simak
Most authorities in economics and sociology regard such an organization as a city an impossible structure, not only from the economic standpoint, but from the sociological and psychological as well. No creature of the highly nervous structure necessary to develop a culture, they point out, would be able to survive within such restricted limits. The result, if it were tried, these authorities say, would lead to mass neuroticism which in a short period of time would destroy the very culture which had built the city.
Clifford D. Simak