Clifford D. Simak quotes - page 7
When I talk of the purpose of life, I am thinking not only of human life, but of all life on Earth and of the life which must exist upon other planets throughout the universe. It is only of life on Earth, however, that one can speak with any certainty. It seems to me that all life on Earth, the sum total of life upon the Earth, has purpose.
Clifford D. Simak
There was no time, Hezekiah had said. No such thing as time in the terms of normal human thought. Time was bracketed and each of its brackets contained a single phase of a universe so vastly beyond human comprehension that it brought a man up short against the impossibility of envisioning it.
Clifford D. Simak
I have tried to imagine ... the various ingredients one might wish to compound in such a package. Beside the bare experience itself, the context of it, one might say, he should want to capture and hold all the subsidiary factors which might serve as a background for it - the sound, the feel of wind and sun, the cloud floating in the sky, the color and the scent. For such a packaging, to give the desired results, must be as perfect as one can make it. It must have all those elements which would be valuable in invoking the total recall of some event that had taken place many years before...
Clifford D. Simak
One was tempted, Enoch thought, to say that this was as far as a tool could go, that it was the ultimate in the ingenuity possessed by any brain. But that would be a dangerous way of thinking, for perhaps there was no limit, there might, quite likely, be no such condition as the ultimate; there might be no time when any creature or any group of creatures could stop at any certain point and say, this is as far as we can go, there is no use of trying to go farther.
Clifford D. Simak
... I said about limiting factors. Well, there's one that you can't beat. Put steel under fifty thousand pounds per square inch pressure and it starts to flow. The metal used in this machine must have been able to withstand much greater pressure, but there was a limit beyond which it was not safe to go. At twenty miles above the planet's surface, they had reached that limit. They had reached dead end.
Clifford D. Simak
The sun was setting, throwing a fog-like dusk across the stream and trees, and there was a coolness in the air. It was time, I knew, to be getting back to camp. But I did not want to move. For 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
For years the folks back home kept on reelecting incompetents. They elected them because they liked the way they snapped their suspenders, not knowing that they never wore suspenders except when they were out electioneering. Or they elected them because they could hit a spittoon, nine times out of ten, at fifteen paces. Or maybe only because these good people back home always voted a straight ticket, no matter who was on it-the way their pappy and grandpappy always did.
Clifford D. Simak
... he got a call from the Internal Revenue Bureau, asking him to pay a visit to the Federal Building.
He spent the night wondering if the wiser course might not be just to disappear. He tried to figure out how a man might go about losing himself and, the more he thought about it, the more apparent it became that, in this age of records, fingerprint checks and identity devices, you could not lose yourself for long.
Clifford D. Simak
You may think that you would confer a boon on humanity with life continuation, but I tell you, sir, that it would be a curse. Life would lose its value and its meaning if it went on forever, and if you have life continuation now, you eventually must stumble on immortality. And when that happens, sir, you will be compelled to set up boards of review to grant the boon of death. The people, tired of life, will storm your hearing rooms to plead for death.
"Man must have newness. Man cannot be bored and live. How much do you think there would be left to look for-ward to after the millionth woman, the billionth piece of pumpkin pie?
Clifford D. Simak
Clifford D. Simak was the most charming of John W. Campbell's writers. And he was a very bad writer at one time, authoring The Cosmic Engineers .
But Campbell had seen something in him, or he had seen something in Campbell, and bit by bit he hauled himself up by his bootstraps in a truly heroic effort.
there wasn't an evil bone in his body, and it show in his work. He was an ornament to the field...
Clifford D. Simak
... one of the hallmarks of his work has always been a warmth and humanness of attitude even toward his un-human characters. And these characters, be they plants, animals, aliens, or robots, are usually anthropomorphized in such an appealing way that the reader almost gets to the point of coveting them as pets.
Clifford D. Simak
As he looked, Sutton felt the cold hand of loneliness reach down with icy fingers to take him in its grip. For here was sheer, mad loneliness such as he had never dreamed. Here was the very negation of life and motion, here was the stark, bald beginning when there was no life, nor even thought of life. Here anything that knew or thought or moved was an alien thing, a disease, a cancer on the face of nothingness.
Clifford D. Simak
When I talk of the purpose of life, I am thinking not only of human life, but of all life on Earth and of the life which must exist upon other planets throughout the universe. It is only of life on Earth, however, that one can speak with any certainty. It seems to me that all life on Earth, the sum total of life upon the Earth, has purpose. If the means were available, we could trace our ancestry - yours and mine - back to the first blob of life-like material that came into being on the planet. The same thing could be done for the spider that spun his web in the grass, and of the grass in which the web was spun, the bird sitting in the tree and the tree in which he sits, the toad waiting for the fly beneath the bush, and for the fly and bush. We are all genetic brothers. The chain of life, tracing back to that primordial day of life's beginning, is unbroken...
Clifford D. Simak
