Clifford D. Simak Quotes
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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.
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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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There is mystery here, but a soft, sure mystery that is understood and only remains a mystery because I want it so. The mystery of the nighthawk against a darkening sky, the puzzle of the firefly along the lilac hedge.
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Whatever doubt might rise, he knew that he was right. But the rightness was an intellectual rightness and the doubt emotional.
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Accident, he wondered, or a way of hiding? Trapped or planned? He had no way of knowing and further speculation was ridiculous, based as it necessarily must be upon earlier assumptions that were entirely without support.
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There have been moments when I also wasn’t able to attach as much importance to football as it seemed to me I should.
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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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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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'McKay tells me that you went home sick,' she said. 'Personally, I hope you don’t survive.'
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Memory and dust, he thought, link us to the past.
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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.
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They would fail. We would always fail. We weren’t built to do anything but fail. We had the wrong kind of motives and we couldn’t change them. We had a built-in short-sightedness and an inherent selfishness and a self-concern that made it impossible to step out of the little human rut we traveled.
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Before Man goes to the stars he should learn how to live on Earth.