Clifford D. Simak Quotes page 2

“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.”

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

“"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."”

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

“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.”

Highway of Eternity (1986)

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

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

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

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

“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.”

Editor’s Preface (p. 5)
City (1952)

“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.”

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

“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.”

Source: Way Station (1963), Ch. 19

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

Highway of Eternity (1986)

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“Sutton sensed resurrection and he fought against it, for death was so comfortable. Like a soft, warm bed. And resurrection was a strident, insistent, maddening alarm clock that shrilled across the predawn chill of a dreadful, frowzy room. Dreadful with its life and its bare reality and its sharp, sickening reminder that one must get up and walk into reality again.”

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

“It was not his fight. Not personally his fight. No more his fight than any one of them. But he had made it his. Because of Stone, because of Rand and Harriet, because of priest who’d hounded him across half the continent, he had tried to make a fight of it. And perhaps, as well, because of something undefinable, unknown to himself, unsuspected in himself—some crazy idealism, some deep-rooted sense of justice, some basic aversion to bullies and bigots and reformers.”

Source: Time and Again (1951), Chapter XXVIII (p. 143)

“The past, he said. The past is too much with me. And the past has made me useless. I have too much to remember—so much to remember that it becomes more important than the things there are to do. I’m living in the past and that is no way to live.”

Source: Time is the Simplest Thing (1961), Chapter 32 (p. 245)

“A million years ago there had been no river here and in a million years to come there might be no river — but in a million years from now there would be, if not Man, at least a caring thing. And that was the secret of the universe, Enoch told himself — a thing that went on caring.”

Source: City (1952), Chapter 7, “Aesop” (p. 201)

“He knew that there was death—that there must be death if there were evolution, that death was one of the mechanisms that biologically spelled progress and advancement for evolutionary species.”

Source: Way Station (1963), Ch. 35

“There have been moments when I also wasn’t able to attach as much importance to football as it seemed to me I should.”

Source: Time is the Simplest Thing (1961), Chapter 10 (p. 75)

“These people must be helped to find themselves in this new world, but they must not know that they’re being helped. To let them know would destroy confidence and dignity, and human dignity is the keystone of any civilization.”

“The Sitters” (p. 73); originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, April 1958
Short Fiction, Skirmish (1977)

“Without consciousness and intelligence, the universe would lack meaning.”

Source: City (1952), Chapter 1, “City” (p. 31)

“Could it be, he wondered, that the goldenness was the Hazers' life force and that they wore it like a cloak, as a sort of over-all disguise? Did they wear that life force on the outside of them while all other creatures wore it on the inside?”

Highway of Eternity (1986)

“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.”

Source: Way Station (1963), Ch. 15

“We feel much sorrow for you, the elm tree had said. But what kind of sorrow—a real and sincere sorrow, or the superficial and pedantic sorrow of the immortal for a frail and flickering creature that was about to die?”

Source: City (1952), Chapter 5, “Paradise” (p. 139)

“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.”

Source: All Flesh is Grass (1965), Chapter 24 (p. 247)

“It’s a wonder to me,” said Adams sourly, “that you don’t simply melt down in the white heat of your brilliance.”

Source: City (1952), Chapter 7, “Aesop” (pp. 206-207)

“The Talisman has been missing for several years or so. And no one knows about it — except Galactic Central and the — what would you call it? — the hierarchy, I suppose, the organization of mystics who takes care of the spiritual setup. And yet, even with no one knowing, the galaxy is beginning to show wear. It's coming apart at the seams. In time to come, it may fall apart. As if the Talisman represented a force that all unknowingly held the races of the galaxy together, exerting its influence even when it remained unseen.”

Source: Time and Again (1951), Chapter XXV (p. 134)

“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.”

Source: Way Station (1963), Ch. 21

“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.”

Source: All Flesh is Grass (1965), Chapter 18 (p. 195)

“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.”

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

“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.”

Source: Way Station (1963), Ch. 30

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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…”

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

“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.”

Highway of Eternity (1986)

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

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