Clifford D. Simak

Quotes

1. "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."

2. 

   Without consciousness and intelligence, the universe would lack meaning.

3. 

   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?

4. 

   "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."

5. 

   An untold time ago, there was a well-founded perception that the human race would end and that something else must take its place.

   Why must something else take its place?

   I cannot tell you that. There is no solid rationale for it, but the belief seemed to be that there must be a dominant race upon this planet. Before men were the dinosaurs and before the dinosaurs there were the trilobites...

6. 

   "It is a net," said Horseface, "useful for the fishing of the universe."

   Enid crinkled up her face, staring at what he called a net. It was a flimsy thing and it had no shape.

   "Certainly," she said, "you would not go fishing the universe in so slight a thing as this."

   "Time means nothing to it," said Horseface, "nor does space. It is independent of both time and space except as it makes use of them."

7. 

   "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."

8. 

   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.

9. 

   What your friend told you of his seeing of the time wall is true, Henry said in Boone's mind. I know he saw it, although imperfectly. Your friend is most unusual. So far as I know, no other human actually can see it; although there are ways of detecting time. I tried to show him a sniffler. There are a number of snifflers, trying to sniff out the bubble. They know there's something strange, but don't know what it is.

10. 

    He stirred again, halfway between sleep and wakefulness, and he was not alone. Across the fire from him sat, or seemed to sit, a man wrapped in some all-enveloping covering that might have been a cloak, wearing on his head a conical hat that dropped down so far it hid his face. Beside him sat the wolf — the wolf, for Boone was certain that it was the same wolf with which he'd found himself sitting nose to nose when he had wakened the night before. The wolf was smiling at him, and he had never known that a wolf could smile.

    He stared at the hat. Who are you? What is this about?

    He spoke in his mind, talking to himself, not really to the hat. He had not spoken aloud for fear of startling the wolf.

    The Hat replied. It is about the brotherhood of life. Who I am is of no consequence. I am only here to act as an interpreter.

    An interpreter for whom?

    For the wolf and you.

    But the wolf does not talk.

    No, he does not talk. But he thinks. He is greatly pleased and puzzled.

    Puzzled I can understand. But pleased?

    He feels a sameness with you. He senses something in you that reminds him of himself. He puzzles what you are.

    In time to come, said Boone, he will be one with us. He will become a dog.

    If he knew that, said The Hat, it would not impress him. He thinks now to be one with you. An equal. A dog is not your equal...

11. 

    We came into a homeless frontier, a place where we were not welcome, where nothing that lived was welcome, where thought and logic were abhorrent and we were frightened, but we went into this place because the universe lay before us, and if we were to know ourselves, we must know the universe...

12. 

    These kind never change. The machine does something to a man. It brutalizes him. It serves as a buffer between himself and his environment and he is the worst for it. It arouses an opportunistic instinct and makes possible a greed that makes a man inhuman.

    p. 152