Clifford D. Simak: Trending quotes (page 6)

“Even if the barrier now should disappear and the Flowers withdraw their attention from our Earth, we still would have been shaken from the comfortable little rut which assumed that life as we know it was the only kind of life and that our road of knowledge was the only one that was broad and straight and paved.
There had been ogres in the past, by finally the ogres had been banished. The trolls and ghouls and imps and all the others of the tribe had been pushed out of our lives, for they could survive only on the misty shores of ignorance and in the land of superstition. Now, I thought, we’d know an ignorance again (but a different kind of ignorance) and superstition, too, for superstition fed upon the lack of knowledge. With this hint of another world—even if its denizens should decide not to flaunt themselves, even if we should find a way to stop them—the trolls and ghouls and goblins would be back with us again. There’d be chimney corner gossip of this other place and a frantic, desperate search to rationalize the implied horror of its vast and unknown reaches, and out of this very search would rise a horror greater than any the other world could hold. We’d be afraid, as we had been before, of the darkness that lay beyond the little circle of our campfire.”

Clifford D. Simak book All Flesh is Grass

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

Life , World , Way , Search

“There was a comfort in the thought, a strange sort of personal comfort in being able to believe that some intelligence might have solved the riddle of that mysterious equation of the universe. And how, perhaps, that mysterious equation might tie in with the spiritual force that was idealistic brother to time and space and all those other elemental factors that held the universe together.”

Clifford D. Simak book Way Station

Source: Way Station (1963), Ch. 30

Intelligence , Universe , Time , Personality

“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.”

Clifford D. Simak

“The Thing in the Stone” (pp. 211-212); originally published in Worlds of If, March 1970
Short Fiction, Skirmish (1977)

Way , Support

“He sat and watched them come and he thought of going in to get a rifle, but he didn’t stir from his seat upon the steps. The rifle would do no good, he told himself. It would be a senseless thing to get it; more than that, a senseless attitude. The least that man could do, he thought, was to meet these creatures of another world with clean and empty hands.”

Clifford D. Simak

“The Big Front Yard” (pp. 142-143); originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, October 1958
Short Fiction, Skirmish (1977)

World

“It would be three-dimensional chess with a million billion squares and a million pieces, and with the rules changing ever move.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time and Again

Source: Time and Again (1951), Chapter XXV (p. 135)

Change

“And here and there a human who saw the rightness of the proposition that Man could not, by mere self-assertion, be a special being; understanding that it was to his greater glory to take his place among the other things of life, as a simple thing of life, as a form of life that could lead and teach and be a friend rather than a thing that conquered and ruled and stood as one apart.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time and Again

Source: Time and Again (1951), Chapter XXXIX (p. 195)

Life , Understanding

“The red thought rose up inside Blaine’s brain: Why not kill him now?
For the killing would come easy. He was an easy man to hate. Not on principle alone, but personally, clear down to his guts.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time is the Simplest Thing

Source: Time is the Simplest Thing (1961), Chapter 26 (p. 206)

Hate , Personality

“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.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time and Again

Source: Time and Again (1951), Chapter XXIV (p. 124)

“Before Man goes to the stars he should learn how to live on Earth.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time and Again

Source: Time and Again (1951), Chapter XLI (p. 204)

Star , Learning

“It wouldn’t be the truth,” said Sutton.
“That,” said Trevor, “doesn’t have a thing to do with it.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time and Again

Source: Time and Again (1951), Chapter XLII (p. 220)

Truth

“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.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time is the Simplest Thing

Source: Time is the Simplest Thing (1961), Chapter 5 (p. 26)

“They are worse than the disinherited. They are not the has-beens, they are the never-weres.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time and Again

Source: Time and Again (1951), Chapter II (p. 14)

“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…”

Clifford D. Simak Highway of Eternity

Highway of Eternity (1986)

Intelligence , Communication , Change

“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.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time and Again

Source: Time and Again (1951), Chapter XXI (p. 107)

Time

“The old and the young, he thought. The old, who do not care; the young, who do not think.”

Clifford D. Simak

“The Autumn Land” (p. 250); originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1971
Short Fiction, Skirmish (1977)

Thinking

“For even if the life of my own Earth and this other Earth on which I stood had started out identically (and they might well have started out identically) there still would be, along the way, millions of little deviations, no one of which, perhaps, by itself, would be significant, but the cumulative effects of all these deviations eventually would result in a life and culture that would bear no resemblance to any other Earth.”

Clifford D. Simak book All Flesh is Grass

Source: All Flesh is Grass (1965), Chapter 12 (p. 123)

Life , Way

“They were the misfits of the world, the outcasts, for they deviated from the norm of humanity as established through all of history. Yet it was this very deviation which made them the hope of all mankind. Ordinary human beings—the kind of human beings who had brought the race this far—were not enough today. The ordinary humans had pushed the culture forward as far as they could push it. It had served its purpose; it had brought the ordinary human as far as he could go. Now the race evolved. Now new abilities had awoke and grown—exactly as the creatures of the Earth had evolved and specialized and then evolved again from that first moment when the first feeble spark of life had come into being in the seething chemical bath of a new and madcap planet.
Twisted brains, the normal people called them; magic people, dwellers of the darkness—and could anyone say no to this? For each people set its standards for each generation and these standards and these norms were not set by any universal rule, by no all-encompassing yardstick, but by what amounted to majority agreement, with the choice arrived at through all the prejudice and bias, all the faulty thinking and the unstable logic to which all intelligence is prone.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time is the Simplest Thing

Source: Time is the Simplest Thing (1961), Chapter 31 (pp. 233-234)

Life , People , World , Hope

““You sound like a rugged individualist,” said Webster.
“You say that like you think it’s funny,” yapped the mayor.
“I do think it’s funny,” said Webster. “Funny, and tragic, that anyone should think that way today.”
“The world would be a lot better off with some rugged individualism,” snapped the mayor. “Look at the men who have gone places—”
“Meaning yourself?” asked Weber.
“You might take me, for example,” Carter agreed. “I worked hard. I took advantage of opportunity. I had some foresight. I did—”
“You mean you licked the correct boots and stepped in the proper faces,” said Webster. “You’re the shining example of the kind of people the world doesn’t want today. You positively smell musty, your ideas are so old. You’re the last of the politicians, Carter, just as I was the last of the Chamber of Commerce secretaries. Only you don’t know it yet. I did. I got out. Even when it cost me something, I got out, because I had to save my self-respect. Your kind of politics is dead. They are dead because any tinhorn with a loud mouth and a brassy front could gain power by appeal to mob psychology. And you haven’t got mob psychology any more. You can’t have mob psychology when people don’t give a damn what happens to a thing that’s dead already—a political system that broke down under its own weight.””

Clifford D. Simak book City

Source: City (1952), Chapter 1, “City” (pp. 34-35)

Men , People , World , Way

“For this, he realized, was the future. It was a place without a single feature of the space-time matrix that he knew. It was a place where nothing yet had happened—an utter emptiness. There was neither light nor dark; there was nothing here but emptiness. There had never been anything in this place, nor was anything ever intended to occupy this place—until this very moment when he and his machine had been thrust upon it, intruders who had overstepped their time.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time is the Simplest Thing

Source: Time is the Simplest Thing (1961), Chapter 33 (pp. 174-175)

Light , Time , Future

“In the east the moon was rising, a full moon that lighted the landscape so that he could see every little clump of bushes, every grove of trees. And as he stood there, he realized with a sudden start that the moon was full again, that it was always full, it rose with the setting of the sun and set just before the sun came up, and it was always a great pumpkin of a moon, an eternal harvest moon shining on an eternal autumn world.
The realization that this was so all at once seemed shocking. How was it that he had never noticed this before? Certainly he had been here long enough, had watched the moon often enough to have noticed it. He had been here long enough — and how long had that been, a few weeks, a few months, a year? He found he did not know. He tried to figure back and there was no way to figure back. There were no temporal landmarks. Nothing ever happened to mark one day from the next. Time flowed so smoothly and so uneventfully that it might as well stand still.”

Clifford D. Simak

“The Autumn Land” (p. 251)
Short Fiction, Skirmish (1977)

World , Way , Autumn , Tree