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Clifford D. Simak

129 quotes

• “Hank Fisher would tell how he'd tried to break into the house and couldn't and there'd be others who would try to break into the house and there'd be hell to pay. Enoch sweated, thinking of it. All the years of keeping out of people's way, all the years of being unobtrusive would be for nothing then. This strange house upon a lonely ridge would become a mystery for the world, and a challenge and a target for all the crackpots of the world.”

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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.”

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “It's not the machine itself that does the trick. The machine merely acts as an intermediary between the sensitive and the spiritual force. It is an extension of the sensitive. It magnifies the capability of the sensitive and acts as a link of some sort. It enables the sensitive to perform his function.”

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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.”

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Ulysses, he thought, had not told him all the truth about the Talisman. He had told him that it had disappeared and that the galaxy was without it, but he had not told him that for many years its power and glory had been dimmed by the failure of its custodian to provide linkage between the people and the force. And all that time the corrosion occasioned by that failure had eaten away at the bonds of the galactic cofraternity.”

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “How strange it is, he thought, how so many senseless things shape our destiny. For the rifle range had been a senseless thing, as senseless as a billiard table or a game of cards — designed for one thing only, to please the keeper of the station. And yet the hours he'd spent there had shaped toward this hour and end, to this single instant on this restricted slope of ground.”

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “There is a certain rapport, a sensitivity — I don't know how to say it — that forms a bridge between this strange machine and the cosmic spiritual force. It is not the machine, itself, you understand, that reaches out and taps the spiritual force. It is the living creature's mind, aided by the mechanism, that brings the force to us.”

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “She always had been in touch with something outside of human ken. She had something in her no other human had. You sensed it, but you could not name it, for there was no name for this thing she had. And she had fumbled with it, trying to use it, not knowing how to use it, charming off the warts and healing poor hurt butterflies and only God knew what other acts that she performed unseen.”

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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.”

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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.”

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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?”

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The robots are not technologically minded. They were not built to be. They were built to bolster human vanity and pride, to meet a strange longing that seems to be built into the human ego—the need to have other humans (or a reasonable facsimile of other humans) to minister to our wants and needs, human slaves to be dominated, human beings over which a man or woman (or a child) can assert authority, thus building up a false feeling of superiority.”

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “He sat in the chair, unmoving, looking at the room and wondering again at the quiet satisfaction that he always found within it, and at times more than satisfaction, as if the room, with its book-lined loftiness and vastness, carried a special benediction. The thoughts of many men, he told himself, resided in the space—all the great thinkers of the world held secure between the bindings of the volumes on the shelves, selected and placed there long ago by his grandfather so that in the days to come the essence of the human race, the heritage of recorded thought, would always be at hand.”

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “—Look, said Jason, it is an old idea. There was never any proof. There was only faith. I have a soul, one would tell himself. He believed it because he had been told by others. Told authoritatively. Without any question. He was told so often and he told himself so often that there was no question in his mind that he had a soul. But there was never any evidence. There was never any proof.”

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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.”

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “He doubted very much that at any time man could have been said to have truly owned the earth. Rather, they had taken it, wresting it from the other creatures that had as much right of ownership as they, but without the intelligence or the ingenuity or power to assert their rights. Man had been pushy, arrogant interloper rather than the owner. He had taken over by the force of mind, which could be as detestable as the force of muscle, making his own rules, setting his own goals, establishing his own values in utter disregard of all other living things.”

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “And how much did he and the others lost when they had turned their backs on magic? Belief, of course, and there might be some value in belief, although there was, as well, delusion and did a man want to pay for the value of belief in the coinage of delusion?”

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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.”

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Now it seemed that this had been a self-sustained illusion he had nourished carefully to bolster a sense of his own importance.”

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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.”

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I bore you, Mr. Carson?” “Not at all,” I told him. And it was the truth. He was not boring me. He fascinated me. It seemed impossible that he could, in conscience, believe this flowery rubbish.”

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Someone must have known, but I never did. I have often wondered. It was the only way, you see, that a war could still be fought. No human could go to fight that kind of war. So man’s servants and companions, the machines, carried on the war. I don’t know why they kept on fighting. I have often asked myself. They’d destroyed all there’d ever been to fight for and there was not use of keeping on.”

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “You do not understand what happens in war—a sort of sublime madness, an unholy hatred that is twisted into an unreasoning sense of righteousness…”

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Like so many other fairy tales, I thought it was a horror story.”

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Space is an illusion, and time as well. There is no such factor as either time or space. We have been blinded by our own cleverness, blinded by false perceptions of those qualities that we term eternity and infinity. There is another factor that explains it all, and once this universal factor is recognized, everything grows simple. There is no longer any mystery, no longer any wonder, no longer any doubt; for the simplicity of it all lies before us...”

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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...”

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “If mankind were to continue in other than the present barbarism, a new path must be found, a new civilization based on some other method than technology.”

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “My reluctance to use alien invasion is due to the feeling that we are not likely to be invaded and taken over. It would seem to me that by the time a race has achieved deep space capability it would have matured to a point where it would have no thought of dominating another intelligent species. Further than this, there should be no economic necessity of its doing so. By the time it was able to go into deep space, it must have arrived at an energy source which would not be based on planetary natural resources.”

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) first seen 1950 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Skirmish” (p. 44); originally published in Amazing Stories, December 1950

• “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 (1904–1988) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Sitters” (p. 73); originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, April 1958

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

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1904–1988) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Big Front Yard” (pp. 142-143); originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, October 1958

• “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 (1904–1988) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Thing in the Stone” (pp. 211-212); originally published in Worlds of If, March 1970

• “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.”

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Autumn Land” (p. 250); originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1971

• “A wrongness persisted, a sense of aberration, some factor not quite right, the feeling of a corner. But Boone could not pin it down; there seemed no way to reach it.”

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “What your friend told you of his seeing of the time wall is true, Henry said in Boone's mind. I know he saw it, although imperfectly. Your friend is most unusual. So far as I know, no other human actually can see it; although there are ways of detecting time. I tried to show him a sniffler. There are a number of snifflers, trying to sniff out the bubble. They know there's something strange, but don't know what it is.”

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Perversity, she thought. Could that have been what happened to the human race — a willing perversity that set at naught all human values which had been so hardly won and structured in the light of reason for a span of more than a million years? Could the human race, quite out of hand and with no sufficient reason, have turned its back upon everything that had built humanity? Or was it, perhaps, no more than second childhood, a shifting of the burden off one's shoulders and going back to the selfishness of the child who romped and frolicked without thought of consequence or liability?”

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Boone gulped and swallowed. He spoke to The Hat. "You said the Highway to Eternity?" That is not what I said. I said the Highway of Eternity. "Small difference," Boone told him. Not so small as you might think.”

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “This is the core of the galaxy," Horseface said. "This is the very center of everything there is. A huge black hole eating up the galaxy. The end of everything.”

  Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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