Clifford D. Simak

Quotes

1. Whatever doubt might rise, he knew that he was right. But the rightness was an intellectual rightness and the doubt emotional.

   p. 14

2. 

   Most authorities in economics and sociology regard such an organization as a city an impossible structure, not only from the economic standpoint, but from the sociological and psychological as well. No creature of the highly nervous structure necessary to develop a culture, they point out, would be able to survive within such restricted limits. The result, if it were tried, these authorities say, would lead to mass neuroticism which in a short period of time would destroy the very culture which had built the city.

   p. 9

3. 

   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.

   p. 139

4. 

   Memory and dust, he thought, link us to the past.

   p. 224

5. 

   Bit by bit, as the legend unfolds, the reader gets a more accurate picture of the human race. By degrees, one gains the conviction that here is a race which can be little more than pure fantasy. It is not the kind of race which could rise from humble beginnings to the eminence of culture with which it is gifted in these tales. Its equipment is too poor.

   So far it lack of stability has become apparent. Its preoccupation with a mechanical civilization rather than with a culture based on some of the sounder, more worthwhile concepts of life indicates a lack of basic character.

   And now, in this tale, we learn of the limited communications which it possessed, a situation which certainly is not conducive to advancement. Man’s inability to understand and appreciate the thought and the viewpoint of another man would be a stumbling block which no amount of mechanical ability could overcome.

   p. 119

6. 

   What is a bow and arrow?

   It is the beginning of the end. It is the winding path that grows to the roaring road of war.

   It is a plaything and a weapon and a triumph in human engineering.

   It is the first faint stirring of an atom bomb.

   It is a symbol of a way of life.

   p. 210

7. 

   One world and then another, running like a chain. One world treading on the heels of another world that plodded just ahead. One world’s tomorrow, another world’s today. And yesterday is tomorrow, and tomorrow is the past.

   Except, there wasn’t any past. No past, that was, except the figment of remembrance that flitted like a night-winged thing in the shadow of one’s mind. No past that one could reach. No pictures painted on the wall of time. No film that one could run backwards and see what-once-had-been...

   One road was open, but another road was closed. Not closed, of course, for it had never been. For there wasn’t any past, there never had been any, there wasn’t room for one. Where there should have been a past there was another world.

   p. 195

8. 

   They sat for a moment, regarding one another; neither understanding. As if we were two aliens, thought Blaine. With viewpoints that did not come within a million miles of coinciding, and yet they both were men.

   p. 70

9. 

   These are the stories the Dogs tell, when the fires burn high and the wind is from the north.

   p. 5

10. 

    “There isn’t any room,” said Joshua. “You travel back along the line of time and you don’t find the past, but another world, another bracket of consciousness. The earth would be the same, you see, or almost the same. Same trees, same rivers, same hills, but it wouldn’t be the world we know. Because it has lived a different life, it has developed differently. The second back of us is not the second back of us at all, but another second, a totally separate sector of time. We live in the same second all the time. We move along within the bracket of that second, that tiny bit of time that has been allotted to our particular world.”

    p. 206

11. 

    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.

    p. 69

12. 

    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.