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Clifford D. Simak citations
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Clifford Donald Simak, né le 3 août 1904 à Millville au Wisconsin et mort le 25 avril 1988 à Minneapolis au Minnesota, est un auteur américain de science-fiction. Les origines modestes de ce fils de fermiers modèleront la plupart des personnages de ses romans. Ses thèmes favoris sont la nature et les robots anthropomorphiques. Son œuvre la plus connue est Demain les chiens.

Il a gagné plusieurs prix Hugo et prix Nebula. En 1976, il reçoit le prix Damon-Knight Memorial Grand Master de la SFWA pour l'ensemble de sa carrière. C'est ainsi que Clifford D. Simak peut être considéré comme faisant partie des écrivains de l'âge d'or de la science-fiction, au même titre que Ray Bradbury ou Isaac Asimov. Wikipedia  

✵ 3. août 1904 – 25. avril 1988  •  Autres noms Клиффорд Саймак, کلیفورد سیماک, 克利福德·D·西马克, 克利福德·D·西馬克
Clifford D. Simak photo
Clifford D. Simak: 150 citations1 J'aime

Clifford D. Simak citations célèbres

“L'Homme a peur. Il a toujours vécu dans la peur. Il a peur. Peur de lui-même.”

Clifford D. Simak livre Au carrefour des étoiles

Citations de ses romans, Au carrefour des étoiles, 1963

“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.”

Clifford D. Simak

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

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

Clifford D. Simak livre Au carrefour des étoiles

Citations de ses romans, Au carrefour des étoiles, 1963

“La galaxie était une tour de Babel.”

Clifford D. Simak livre Au carrefour des étoiles

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.”

Clifford D. Simak

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

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

Clifford D. Simak

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

Clifford D. Simak Citations

“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?”

Clifford D. Simak

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

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

Clifford D. Simak livre Au carrefour des étoiles

Citations de ses romans, Au carrefour des étoiles, 1963

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

Clifford D. Simak

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

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

Clifford D. Simak livre Au carrefour des étoiles

Citations de ses romans, Au carrefour des étoiles, 1963

“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?”

Clifford D. Simak livre Au carrefour des étoiles

Citations de ses romans, Au carrefour des étoiles, 1963

“La cité est un anachronisme.”

Clifford D. Simak

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

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

Clifford D. Simak

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

Clifford D. Simak: Citations en anglais

“You sometimes get a thrill at knowing where you are. You’re often filled with wonder, but more often you are puzzled. You are reminded, again and yet again, of how insignificant you are. And there are times when you forget that you are human. You’re just a blob of life—brother to everything that ever existed or ever will exist.”

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Clifford D. Simak livre Time is the Simplest Thing

Source: Time is the Simplest Thing (1961), Chapter 9 (p. 69)

“McKay tells me that you went home sick,” she said. “Personally, I hope you don’t survive.”

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Clifford D. Simak

“Skirmish” (p. 44); originally published in Amazing Stories, December 1950
Short Fiction, Skirmish (1977)

““Anita,” he asked, “are there really werewolves?”
“Yes,” she told him. “Your werewolves are down there.”
And that was right, he thought. The darkness of the mind, the bleakness of the thought, the shallowness of purpose. These were the werewolves of the world.”

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Clifford D. Simak livre Time is the Simplest Thing

Source: Time is the Simplest Thing (1961), Chapter 34 (p. 263)

“We came into a homeless frontier, a place where we were not welcome, where nothing that lived was welcome, where thought and logic were abhorrent and we were frightened, but we went into this place because the universe lay before us, and if we were to know ourselves, we must know the universe…”

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Clifford D. Simak livre A Heritage of Stars

A Heritage of Stars (1977)

“This was the past and it was the dead past; there were only corpses in it—and perhaps not even corpses, but the shadows of those corpses. For the dead trees and the fence posts and the bridges and the buildings on the hill all would classify as shadows. There was no life here; the life was up ahead. Life must occupy but a single point in time, and as time moved forward, life moved with it. And so was gone, thought Blaine, any dream that Man might have ever held of visiting the past and living in the action and the thought and the viewpoint of men who’d long been dust. For the living past did not exist, nor did the human past except in the records of the past. The present was the only valid point for life—life kept moving on, keeping pace with the present, and once it had passed, all traces of it or its existences were carefully erased.”

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Clifford D. Simak livre Time is the Simplest Thing

Source: Time is the Simplest Thing (1961), Chapter 11 (p. 87)

“Time is still the great mystery to us. It is no more than a concept; we don't know if it even exists…”

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Clifford D. Simak livre Shakespeare's Planet

Shakespeare's Planet (1976)

“The Talisman could be operated only by certain beings with certain types of minds and something else besides (could it be, he wondered, with certain kinds of souls?). "Sensitives" was the word he had used in his mental translation of the term for these kinds of people, but once again, he could not be sure if the word came close to fitting. The Talisman was placed in the custody of the most capable, or the most efficient, or the most devoted (whichever it might be) of the galactic sensitives, who carried it from star to star in a sort of eternal progression. And on each planet the people came to make personal and individual contact with the spiritual force through the intervention and the agency of the Talisman and its custodian.
He found that he was shivering at the thought of it — the pure ecstasy of reaching out and touching the spirituality that flooded through the galaxy and, undoubtedly, through the universe. The assurance would be there, he thought, the assurance that life had a special place in the great scheme of existence, that one, no matter how small, how feeble, how insignificant, still did count for something in the vast sweep of space and time.”

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Clifford D. Simak livre Au carrefour des étoiles

Source: Way Station (1963), Ch. 12

“It was authority that turned men suspicious and stern-faced. Authority and responsibility which made them not themselves, but a sort of corporate body that tried to think as a corporate body rather than as a person.”

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Clifford D. Simak livre Time is the Simplest Thing

Source: Time is the Simplest Thing (1961), Chapter 32 (pp. 245-246)

“First there was space—endless, limitless space, so far from everything, so brutal, so frigid, so uncaring that it numbed the mind, not so much from fear or loneliness as from the realization that in this eternity of space the thing that was himself was dwarfed to an insignificance no yardstick could measure.”

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Clifford D. Simak

“The Thing in the Stone” (p. 220)
Short Fiction, Skirmish (1977)

“If there could only be more time, he thought. But, of course, there never was. There was not the time right now and there would never be. No matter how many centuries he might be able to devote, there'd always be so much more knowledge than he'd gathered at the moment that the little he had gathered would always seem a pittance.”

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Clifford D. Simak livre Au carrefour des étoiles

Source: Way Station (1963), Ch. 23

“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?”

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Clifford D. Simak livre Au carrefour des étoiles

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: Way Station (1963), Ch. 21

“… his work gradually became identifiably Simakian — constrained, intensely emotional beneath a calmly competent Genre SF surface; tales deeply Pastoral in the sense that his idylls, his Edens, were almost inevitably supported by some superior civilization, sometimes urban… <…”

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Clifford D. Simak

““… I said about limiting factors. Well, there’s one that you can’t beat. Put steel under fifty thousand pounds per square inch pressure and it starts to flow. The metal used in this machine must have been able to withstand much greater pressure, but there was a limit beyond which it was not safe to go. At twenty miles above the planet’s surface, they had reached that limit. They had reached dead end.” <…>”

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Clifford D. Simak

Из малой прозы

“There is a streak of cruelty <…> that runs through the human race. You find it everywhere you look, on every page of recorded history. Man is not satisfied with inflicting death alone, he must inflict it with many painful frills. A boy pulls the wings off flies and ties tin cans to a dog's tail. The Assyrians flayed screaming thousands while they were still alive. <…> The Aztecs <…> cut out the hearts of their living sacrifices with a blunt stone knife. The Saxons threw men into the serpent pits or flayed them living and rubbed salt into the quivering flesh as the pelt peeled off.”

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Clifford D. Simak

Из малой прозы

“The situation outlined is immaterial to us. We could help humanity, but there is no reason that we should. Humanity is a transient factor and is none of our concern.”

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Clifford D. Simak livre A Choice of Gods

Source: A Choice of Gods (1972), Chapter 22 (p. 130)

“It seems to be a social axiom that as misery and privation increase for the many, the few rise ever higher in luxury and comfort, feeding on the misery. Not aware, perhaps, that they feed upon the misery, not with any wish of feeding on it—but they do.”

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Clifford D. Simak livre A Choice of Gods

Source: A Choice of Gods (1972), Chapter 6 (p. 46)

“These kind never change. The machine does something to a man. It brutalizes him. It serves as a buffer between himself and his environment and he is the worst for it. It arouses an opportunistic instinct and makes possible a greed that makes a man inhuman.”

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Clifford D. Simak livre A Choice of Gods

Source: A Choice of Gods (1972), Chapter 28 (p. 152)

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