Clifford D. Simak Quotes

The chain of life runs smoothly from one generation to the next and none of the links stand out except here and there a link one sees by accident.

Perversity, she thought. 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? Could the human race, quite out of hand and with no sufficient reason, have turned its back upon everything that had built humanity? Or was it, perhaps, no more than second childhood, a shifting of the burden off one's shoulders and going back to the selfishness of the child who romped and frolicked without thought of consequence or liability?

Pues esto no es nada risible. Se trata sólo de un arco y una flecha, pero no es risible. Pudo haberlo sido en otro tiempo, pero la historia destruyó la comicidad de muchas cosas. Si el arco es un chiste, también lo es entonces la bomba atómica y lo mismo el polvo pestífero que barrió ciudades enteras, y lo mismo el cohete sibilante que se eleva y cae a quince mil kilómetros de distancia matando a un millón de personas.

The once all-important thing had been buried by more than fifty years of other all-important matters.

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.

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.

Скромното удовлетворение на работника от една работа, свършена достатъчно добре, за да бъде приета от неговите другари като честно усилие, е всичко, което би могъл да иска.

She was a creature of the woods and hills, of springtime flower and autumn flight of birds. She knew these things and lived with them and was, in some strange way, a specific part of them. She was one who dwelt apart in an old and lost apartment of the natural world. She occupied a place that Man long since had abandoned, if, in fact, he’d ever held it.

We have time travel," she said, "and none of us, I am sure, really understands it. We stole it from the Infinites. To steal time travel was the one way we could fight back, the one way we could flee. The human race had far space travel before the Infinites showed up. I think it was our far travel that aroused the interest of the Infinites in us. I've often wondered if some of the very primitive principles of time might not have made our many-times-faster-than-light travel possible. Time is somehow tied into space, but I have never known quite how.

You still could go to some industry or some university or the government and if you could persuade them you had something on the ball — why, then, they might put up the cash after cutting themselves in on just about all of the profits. And, naturally, they'd run the show because it was their money and all you had done was the sweating and the bleeding.

Sutton sensed resurrection and he fought against it, for death was so comfortable. Like a soft, warm bed. And resurrection was a strident, insistent, maddening alarm clock that shrilled across the predawn chill of a dreadful, frowzy room. Dreadful with its life and its bare reality and its sharp, sickening reminder that one must get up and walk into reality again.

She looked quickly up. And then her eyes once more went back to the flashing thing she was holding in her hands. He saw that it was the pyramid of spheres and now all the spheres were spinning slowly, in alternating clockwise and counterclockwise motions, and that as they spun they shone and glittered, each in its own particular color, as if there might be, deep inside each one of them, a source of soft, warm light.
Enoch caught his breath at the beauty and the wonder of it — the old, hard wonder of what this thing might be and what it might be meant to do. He had examined it a hundred times or more and had puzzled at it and there had been nothing he could find that was of significance. So far as he could see, it was only something that was meant to be looked at, although there had been that persistent feeling that it had a purpose and that, perhaps, somehow, it was meant to operate.
And now it was in operation. He had tried a hundred times to get it figured out and Lucy had picked it up just once and had got it figured out. He noticed the rapture with which she was regarding it. Was it possible, he wondered, that she knew its purpose?

He had acted on an impulse, with no thought at all. The girl had asked protection and here she had protection, here nothing in the world ever could get at her. But she was a human being and no human being, other than himself, should have ever crossed the threshold. But it was done and there was no way to change it. Once across the threshold, there was no way to change it.

"I can't go back," said Towser.
"Nor I," said Fowler.
"They would turn me back into a dog," said Towser.
"And me," said Fowler, "back into a man."

He sat in the chair, unmoving, looking at the room and wondering again at the quiet satisfaction that he always found within it, and at times more than satisfaction, as if the room, with its book-lined loftiness and vastness, carried a special benediction. The thoughts of many men, he told himself, resided in the space—all the great thinkers of the world held secure between the bindings of the volumes on the shelves, selected and placed there long ago by his grandfather so that in the days to come the essence of the human race, the heritage of recorded thought, would always be at hand.