Quotes from book
Time and Again

Time and Again
Clifford D. Simak

Time and Again is a 1951 science fiction novel by American writer Clifford D. Simak. An alternate paperback title was First He Died; it was also serialized as Time Quarry.The plot involved a long-lost spaceman returning to Earth from a distant planet where the "souls" of humans may live. His fuddled observations spark a religious schism and war, and "future folk insist [he] should be killed on sight as he will otherwise write a book that, because it tells a truth inconvenient to religious bigots, will cause the death of millions". Evolutionary transcendence is a theme, as it was for a number of other Simak novels. The novel is one of Simak's more popular works.

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“Memory and dust, he thought, link us to the past.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time and Again

Source: Time and Again (1951), Chapter XLIII (p. 224)

Clifford D. Simak photo

“And death was a soft thing, soft and black, cool and sweet and gracious. He slipped into it as a swimmer slips into the surf and it closed over him and held him and he felt the pulse and beat of it and knew the vastness and sureness of it.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time and Again

Source: Time and Again (1951), Chapter XXVI (p. 139)

Clifford D. Simak photo

“Dreams, she said. Broken dreams are bad enough. But the dream that has no hope…the dream that is doomed long before it’s broken, that’s the worst of all.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time and Again

Source: Time and Again (1951), Chapter XXXV (p. 183)

Clifford D. Simak photo

“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)

Clifford D. Simak photo

“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)

Clifford D. Simak photo

“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 book Time and Again

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

Clifford D. Simak photo

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

Clifford D. Simak book Time and Again

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

Clifford D. Simak photo

“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)

Clifford D. Simak photo

“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)

Clifford D. Simak photo

“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)

Clifford D. Simak photo

“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)

Clifford D. Simak photo

“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)

Clifford D. Simak photo

“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)

Clifford D. Simak photo

“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)

Clifford D. Simak photo

“You either obey a law or you forfeit it. You can’t forget it with one breath and invoke it with the next.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time and Again

Source: Time and Again (1951), Chapter V (pp. 27-28)
Context: “You do not belong to any bona fide religion that prohibits killing?”
“I presume I could classify myself as a Christian,” said Sutton. “I believe there is a Commandment about killing.”
The robot shook his head. “It doesn’t count.”
“It is clear and specific,” Sutton argued. “It says, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’”
“It is all of that,” the robot told him. “But it has been discredited. You humans discredited it yourselves. You never obeyed it. You either obey a law or you forfeit it. You can’t forget it with one breath and invoke it with the next.”

Clifford D. Simak photo

“Here was the very negation of life and motion, here was the stark, bald beginning when there was no life, nor even thought of life.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time and Again

Source: Time and Again (1951), Chapter XIX (p. 99)
Context: As he looked, Sutton felt the cold hand of loneliness reach down with icy fingers to take him in its grip. For here was sheer, mad loneliness such as he had never dreamed. Here was the very negation of life and motion, here was the stark, bald beginning when there was no life, nor even thought of life. Here anything that knew or thought or moved was an alien thing, a disease, a cancer on the face of nothingness.

Clifford D. Simak photo

“There is mystery here, but a soft, sure mystery that is understood and only remains a mystery because I want it so.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time and Again

Source: Time and Again (1951), Chapter I (p. 6)
Context: There is mystery here, but a soft, sure mystery that is understood and only remains a mystery because I want it so. The mystery of the nighthawk against a darkening sky, the puzzle of the firefly along the lilac hedge.

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