Clifford D. Simak: Trending quotes (page 4)

“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.”

Clifford D. Simak book All Flesh is Grass

Source: All Flesh is Grass (1965), Chapter 11 (p. 105)

World

“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.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time is the Simplest Thing

Source: Time is the Simplest Thing (1961), Chapter 9 (p. 70)

Men , Understanding

“"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."”

Clifford D. Simak Highway of Eternity

Highway of Eternity (1986)

Fish , Universe , Time

“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.”

Clifford D. Simak book City

Notes on the Fifth Tale (p. 119)
City (1952)

Life , Communication , Understanding , Learning

“Beyond his own sure knowledge, he had not a shred of proof.”

Clifford D. Simak

“The Sitters” (p. 90)
Short Fiction, Skirmish (1977)

Knowledge

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

Clifford D. Simak book City

Editor’s Preface (p. 5)
City (1952)

Dogs

“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 book Time and Again

Source: Time and Again (1951), Chapter XII (p. 72)

Life

“The alien stood in shadow and he looked, Enoch thought, more than ever like the cruel clown. His lithe, flowing body had the look of smoked, tanned buckskin. The patchwork color of his hide seemed to shine with a faint luminescence and the sharp, hard angles of his face, the smooth baldness of his head, the flat, pointed ears pasted tight against the skull lent him a vicious fearsomeness.
If one did not know him for the gentle character that he was, Enoch told himself, he would be enough to scare a man out of seven years of growth.”

Clifford D. Simak book Way Station

Source: Way Station (1963), Ch. 19

Color , Past

“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.”

Clifford D. Simak book City

Source: City (1952), Chapter 7, “Aesop” (p. 210)

Life , War , Way

“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.”

Clifford D. Simak book City

Source: City (1952), Chapter 7, “Aesop” (pp. 195-196)

World , Time , Past , Painting

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

Clifford D. Simak book Time is the Simplest Thing

Source: Time is the Simplest Thing (1961), Chapter 3 (p. 14)

“We thought all the time that we were passing through time when we really weren’t, when we never have. We’ve just been moving along with time. We said, there’s another second gone, there’s another minute and another hour and another day, when, as a matter of fact the second or the minute or the hour was never gone. It was the same one all the time. It had just moved along and we had moved with it.”

Clifford D. Simak book City

Source: City (1952), Chapter 7, “Aesop” (p. 207)

Time

“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.”

Clifford D. Simak book City

Notes on the First Tale (pp. 9-10)
City (1952)

Time

“They’re just ordinary people,” Nancy said. “You can’t expect too much of them.”

Clifford D. Simak book All Flesh is Grass

Source: All Flesh is Grass (1965), Chapter 17 (p. 179)

People

“Where would one find an answer? For the belief—the will to believe—was engrained deeply in the human fiber. Not entirely, either, in the matrix of the present situation, but in the blood and bone of Man clear back to the caves. There was in the soul of Man a certain deadly fascination with all things macabre. The situation as it stood had been grasped willingly, almost eagerly, by men for whom the world had become a rather tame and vapid place with no terror in it beyond the brute force terror of atomic weapons and the dread uncertainty of unstable men in power.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time is the Simplest Thing

Source: Time is the Simplest Thing (1961), Chapter 13 (p. 101)

Men , World , Soul

“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 Highway of Eternity

Highway of Eternity (1986)

Imagination , Universe

“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 book Time and Again

Source: Time and Again (1951), Chapter XLII (p. 215)

Time

“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 book Time is the Simplest Thing

Source: Time is the Simplest Thing (1961), Chapter 32 (p. 249)

Life

“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 book City

Notes on the Third Tale (p. 69)
City (1952)

Way , Knowledge

“In those villages, he wondered, how much ability and genius might be lying barren, ability and genius that the world could use but would never know because of the intolerance and hate which was held against the very people who were least qualified as the targets of it.
And the pity of it was that such hate and such intolerance would never have been born, could never have existed, had it not been for men like Finn—the bigots and the egomaniacs; the harsh, stern Puritans; the little men who felt the need of power to lift them from their smallness.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time is the Simplest Thing

Source: Time is the Simplest Thing (1961), Chapter 30 (p. 227)

Men , Hate , People , World