Clifford D. Simak Quotes
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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.
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What do you mean by faith? Is faith enough for Man? Should he be satisfied with faith alone? Is there no way of finding out the truth? Is the attitude of faith, of believing in something for which there can be no more than philosophic proof, the true mark of a Christian?
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'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...'
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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.
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Without consciousness and intelligence, the universe would lack meaning.
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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.
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'Anita,' he asked, 'are there really werewolves?''Yes,' she told him. 'Your werewolves are down there.'And that was right, he thought. The darkness of the mind, the bleakness of the thought, the shallowness of purpose. These were the werewolves of the world.
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'It wouldn’t be the truth,' said Sutton.'That,' said Trevor, 'doesn’t have a thing to do with it.'
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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.
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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.'
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The past, he said. The past is too much with me. And the past has made me useless. I have too much to remember-so much to remember that it becomes more important than the things there are to do. I’m living in the past and that is no way to live.
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The people finally know. They've been told about the mutants. And they hated the mutants. Of course, they hated them. They hated them because the existence of the mutants makes them second-class humans, because they are Neanderthalers suddenly invaded by a bow and arrow people.
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Beyond his own sure knowledge, he had not a shred of proof.
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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.
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'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.'
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Boone gulped and swallowed. He spoke to The Hat. 'You said the Highway to Eternity?' That is not what I said. I said the Highway of Eternity.'Small difference,' Boone told him. Not so small as you might think.
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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.
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You sometimes get a thrill at knowing where you are. You’re often filled with wonder, but more often you are puzzled. You are reminded, again and yet again, of how insignificant you are. And there are times when you forget that you are human. You’re just a blob of life-brother to everything that ever existed or ever will exist.
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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.
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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.
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The old and the young, he thought. The old, who do not care; the young, who do not think.
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These are the stories the Dogs tell, when the fires burn high and the wind is from the north.
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They are worse than the disinherited. They are not the has-beens, they are the never-weres.
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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.