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'Much of what we see in the universe,' said Hugo, 'starts out as imaginary. Often you must imagine something before you can come to terms with it.'
Clifford D. Simak -
They’d lived all their life on Earth; they knew nothing but the Earth. They had never really touched an alien concept, and that was all this concept was. It was not really as slimy as it seemed. It was only alien. There were a lot of alien things that could make one’s hair stand up on end while in their proper alien context they were fairly ordinary.
Clifford D. Simak
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'We're very close to immortal, you know. The time mechanism keeps it that way.' 'No, I hadn't known,' said Boone. 'Inside the time bubble we do not age. We age only when we are outside of it.'
Clifford D. Simak -
'They changed,' said Enid, 'from corporeal beings, from biological beings, to incorporeal beings, immaterial, pure intelligences. They now are ranged in huge communities on crystal lattices...'
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 -
The party was beginning to get noisy-not boisterous, but noisy. It was beginning to acquire that stale air of futility to which, in the end, all parties must fall victim.
Clifford D. Simak -
Individualists would have little use for a device which would make them understand one another, for they would not care whether they understood one another.
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
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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 -
Without consciousness and intelligence, the universe would lack meaning.
Clifford D. Simak -
To cover up actual lack of knowledge, the tale develops an explanation which amounts to divine intervention. It is an easy and, to the primitive mind, a plausible and satisfactory way to explain something of which nothing at all is known.
Clifford D. Simak -
Beyond his own sure knowledge, he had not a shred of proof.
Clifford D. Simak -
These are the stories the Dogs tell, when the fires burn high and the wind is from the north.
Clifford D. Simak -
I have not long to live. I have lasted more than a man’s average allotted span, and while I still am hale and hearty, I know full well the hand of time, while it may miss a man at one reaping, will get him at the next.
Clifford D. Simak
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If there could only be more time, he thought. But, of course, there never was. There was not the time right now and there would never be. No matter how many centuries he might be able to devote, there'd always be so much more knowledge than he'd gathered at the moment that the little he had gathered would always seem a pittance.
Clifford D. Simak -
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.
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 -
They are worse than the disinherited. They are not the has-beens, they are the never-weres.
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 -
'Propaganda,' Trevor said. 'Let’s call it psychology. You say a thing so often and so well that after a time everyone believes it. Even, finally, yourself.'
Clifford D. Simak
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It would be three-dimensional chess with a million billion squares and a million pieces, and with the rules changing ever move.
Clifford D. Simak -
He knew that there was death-that there must be death if there were evolution, that death was one of the mechanisms that biologically spelled progress and advancement for evolutionary species.
Clifford D. Simak -
It was authority that turned men suspicious and stern-faced. Authority and responsibility which made them not themselves, but a sort of corporate body that tried to think as a corporate body rather than as a person.
Clifford D. Simak -
I’m just a propagandist and a propagandist doesn’t have to know what he is talking about, just so he talks about it most convincingly.
Clifford D. Simak