Clifford D. Simak citations Page 3

“Un chien a une personnalité. On la sent dans chaque chien que l'on rencontre. Il n'y en a pas deux qui soient semblables d'humeur et de tempérament. Et tous sont intelligents à des degrés divers. Il n'en faut pas davantage : une personnalité consciente et une certaine dose d'intelligence.”

Citations de ses romans, Au carrefour des étoiles, 1963

“L'homme n'était pas seul. Pour peu qu'il s'engageât sur la bonne route, il ne serait plus jamais seul.”

Citations de ses romans, Demain les chiens (City), 1944

“La galaxie était une tour de Babel.”

Citations de ses romans, Au carrefour des étoiles, 1963

“Il y avait pour l'homme une route et une seule : celle de l'arc et de la flèche.”

Citations de ses romans, Au carrefour des étoiles, 1963

“Peut-être les cerveaux des créatures terrestres sont-ils naturellement lents et brouillons. Peut-être sommes-nous les demeurés de l'univers.”

Citations de ses romans, Demain les chiens (City), 1944

“La préservation de la race, le progrès de la race, mais vous n'avez que ces mots-là à la bouche. Pourquoi vous en soucieriez-vous?”

Citations de ses romans, Demain les chiens (City), 1944

Clifford D. Simak Citations

“Que cherchez-vous à m'expliquer? Que la population rétrograde du Wisconsin pratique la conspiration du silence?”

Citations de ses romans, Demain les chiens (City), 1944

“Vous ne devez pas traîner le souvenir de l'Homme comme un boulet.”

Citations de ses romans, Au carrefour des étoiles, 1963

“Combien de guerres les Terriens pourront-ils encore supporter?”

Citations de ses romans, Demain les chiens (City), 1944

“La guerre était-elle une impulsion instinctive dont le commun des mortels était tout autant responsable que les politiciens et les soi-disant hommes d'État?”

Citations de ses romans, Au carrefour des étoiles, 1963

“La cité est un anachronisme.”

Citations de ses romans, Au carrefour des étoiles, 1963

“Le besoin de chaque être humain est de se sentir approuvé par ses semblables.”

Citations de ses romans, Demain les chiens (City), 1944

“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.”

Citations de ses romans, Demain les chiens (City), 1944

Clifford D. Simak: Citations en anglais

“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 livre All Flesh is Grass

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."”

Clifford D. Simak livre Time is the Simplest Thing

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.”

Clifford D. Simak Highway of Eternity

Highway of Eternity (1986)

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

Clifford D. Simak livre City

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.”

Clifford D. Simak livre City

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.”

Clifford D. Simak livre Time and Again

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.”

Clifford D. Simak livre Au carrefour des étoiles

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.”

Clifford D. Simak livre City

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.”

Clifford D. Simak livre City

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.”

Clifford D. Simak livre Time is the Simplest Thing

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.”

Clifford D. Simak livre City

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

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

Clifford D. Simak livre City

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.”

Clifford D. Simak livre All Flesh is Grass

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.”

Clifford D. Simak livre Time is the Simplest Thing

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.”

Clifford D. Simak Highway of Eternity

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.”

Clifford D. Simak livre Time and Again

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.”

Clifford D. Simak livre Time is the Simplest Thing

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.”

Clifford D. Simak livre City

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

“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.”

Clifford D. Simak livre Time is the Simplest Thing

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

“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.”

Clifford D. Simak Highway of Eternity

Highway of Eternity (1986)

“"We're very close to immortal, you know. The time mechanism keeps it that way."
"No, I hadn't known," said Boone.
"Inside the time bubble we do not age. We age only when we are outside of it."”

Clifford D. Simak livre Time and Again

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

“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.”

Clifford D. Simak Highway of Eternity

Highway of Eternity (1986)

“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.”

Clifford D. Simak livre Time is the Simplest Thing

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.”

Clifford D. Simak livre City

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.”

Clifford D. Simak livre Au carrefour des étoiles

Source: Way Station (1963), Ch. 35

“As an auxiliary to all of this," he said, "I have found myself speculating upon a world in which no one ever grew up. I admit, of course, that it is a rather acrobatic feat of thinking, not entirely consistent, to leap from the one idea to the other. In a world where one was able to package his experiences, he merely would be able to relive at some future time the experiences of the past. But in a world of the eternally young he'd have no need of such packaging. Each new day would bring the same freshness and the everlasting wonder inherent in the world of children. There would be no realization of death and no fear born of the knowledge of the future. Life would be eternal and there'd be no thought of change. One would exist in an everlasting matrix and while there would be little variation from one day to the next, one would not be aware of this and there'd be no boredom…”

Clifford D. Simak livre Time is the Simplest Thing

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

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

Clifford D. Simak livre Cemetery World

Cemetery World (1973)

“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…”

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