Clifford D. Simak (Writer)

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.Introduction p. ix

— Clifford D. Simak time

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.“The Thing in the Stone” p. 220

— Clifford D. Simak fear

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.Chapter I p. 6

— Clifford D. Simak mystery

They are worse than the disinherited. They are not the has-beens, they are the never-weres.Chapter II p. 14

— Clifford D. Simak sin

“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.”Chapter V pp. 27-28

— Clifford D. Simak religion

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.Chapter XII p. 72

— Clifford D. Simak life

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.Chapter XIX p. 99

— Clifford D. Simak life

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.Chapter XXI p. 107

— Clifford D. Simak time

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.Chapter XXIV p. 124

— Clifford D. Simak

“It’s a wonder to me,” said Adams sourly, “that you don’t simply melt down in the white heat of your brilliance.”Chapter XXV p. 134

— Clifford D. Simak wonder

It would be three-dimensional chess with a million billion squares and a million pieces, and with the rules changing ever move.Chapter XXV p. 135

— Clifford D. Simak men

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.Chapter XXVI p. 139

— Clifford D. Simak death

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.Chapter XXVIII p. 143

— Clifford D. Simak life

Dreams, she said. Broken dreams are bad enough. But the dream that has no hopethe dream that is doomed long before it’s broken, that’s the worst of all.Chapter XXXV p. 183

— Clifford D. Simak hope

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.Chapter XXXIX p. 195

— Clifford D. Simak life

“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.”Chapter XLII p. 215

— Clifford D. Simak time

“It wouldn’t be the truth,” said Sutton. “That,” said Trevor, “doesn’t have a thing to do with it.”Chapter XLII p. 220

— Clifford D. Simak truth

These are the stories the Dogs tell, when the fires burn high and the wind is from the north.Editor’s Preface p. 5

— Clifford D. Simak stories

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.Notes on the First Tale pp. 9-10

— Clifford D. Simak time

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.Chapter 1, “City” p. 31

— Clifford D. Simak people

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.Notes on the Third Tale p. 69

— Clifford D. Simak knowledge

Man was engaged in a mad scramble for power and knowledge, but nowhere is there any hint of what he meant to do with it once he had attained it.Notes on the Fifth Tale p. 120

— Clifford D. Simak knowledge

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.Chapter 5, “Paradise” p. 139

— Clifford D. Simak care

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.Chapter 7, “Aesop” pp. 195-196

— Clifford D. Simak war

“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.”Chapter 7, “Aesop” pp. 206-207

— Clifford D. Simak life

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.Chapter 7, “Aesop” p. 207

— Clifford D. Simak time

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.Chapter 7, “Aesop” p. 201

— Clifford D. Simak living

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.Chapter 7, “Aesop” p. 210

— Clifford D. Simak life

There was a world of mutants, men and women who were more than normal men and women, persons who had certain human talents and certain human understandings which the normal men and women of the world had never known, or having known, could not utilize in their entirety, unable to use intelligently all the mighty powers which lay dormant in their brains.

— Clifford D. Simak women

The people finally know. Theyve been told about the mutants. And they hated the mutants. Of course, they hated them. They hated them because the existence of the mutants makes them second-class humans, because they are Neanderthalers suddenly invaded by a bow and arrow people.

— Clifford D. Simak people

It was a place without a single feature of the space-time matrix that he knew. It was a place where nothing yet had happened — an utter emptiness. There was neither light nor dark: there was nothing here but emptiness. There had never been anything in this place, nor was anything ever intended to occupy this place

— Clifford D. Simak time

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 whod 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.

— Clifford D. Simak life

There were certain basic things, perhaps — the very earth, itself — which existed through every point in time, holding a sort of limited eternity to provide a solid matrix. And the dead — the dead and fabricated — stayed in the past as ghosts. The fence posts and the wire strung on them, the dead trees, the farm buildings, and the bridge were shadows of the present persisting in the past. Persisting, perhaps, reluctantly, because since they had no life they could not move along. They were bound in time and stretched through time and they were long, long shadows. He was, he realized with a shock, the only living thing existing in this moment on this earth. He and nothing else

— Clifford D. Simak life

What do you mean by faith? Is faith enough for Man? Should he be satisfied with faith alone? Is there no way of finding out the truth? Is the attitude of faith, of believing in something for which there can be no more than philosophic proof, the true mark of a Christian?

— Clifford D. Simak truth

It was a hopeless thing, he thought, this obsession of his to present the people of the Earth as good and reasonable. For in many ways they were neither good nor reasonable; perhaps because they had not as yet entirely grown up. They were smart and quick and at times compassionate and even understanding, but they failed lamentably in many other ways. But if they had the chance, Enoch told himself, if they ever got a break, if they only could be told what was out in space, then theyd get a grip upon themselves and they would measure up and then, in the course of time, would be admitted into the great cofraternity of the people of the stars.Ch. 11

— Clifford D. Simak hope

There was so much knowledge in the galaxy and he knew so little of it, understood so little of the little that he knew. There were men on Earth who could make sense of it. Men who would give anything short of their very lives to know the little that he knew, and could put it all to use. Out among the stars lay a massive body of knowledge, some of it an extension of what mankind knew, some of it concerning matters which Man had not yet suspected, and used in ways and for purposes that Man had not as yet imagined. And never might imagine, if left on his own.Ch. 11

— Clifford D. Simak knowledge

The impulse patterns which carried creatures star to star were almost instantaneous, no matter what the distance. He stood and thought about it and it still was hard, he admitted to himself, for a person to believe.Ch. 12

— Clifford D. Simak self

His mind went back to that strange business of the spiritual force and the even stranger machine which had been built eons ago, by means of which the galactic people were able to establish contact with the force. There was a name for that machine, but there was no word in the English language which closely approximated it. Talisman was the closest, but Talisman was too crude a word. Although that had been the word that Ulysses had used when, some years ago, they had talked of it.Ch. 12

— Clifford D. Simak people

He had dabbled in a thing which he had not understood. And had, furthermore, committed that greater sin of thinking that he did understand. And the fact of the matter was that he had just barely understood enough to make the concept work, but had not understood enough to be aware of its consequences.Ch. 13

— Clifford D. Simak war

The Hazer would be arriving at about the same time as Ulysses and the three of them could spend a pleasant evening. It was not too often that two good friends ever visited here at once. He stood a bit aghast at thinking of the Hazer as a friend, for more than likely the being itself was one he had never met. But that made little difference, for a Hazer, any Hazer, would turn out to be a friend.Ch. 14

— Clifford D. Simak time

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?Ch. 15

— Clifford D. Simak life

He had acted on an impulse, with no thought at all. The girl had asked protection and here she had protection, here nothing in the world ever could get at her. But she was a human being and no human being, other than himself, should have ever crossed the threshold. But it was done and there was no way to change it. Once across the threshold, there was no way to change it.Ch. 16

— Clifford D. Simak change

Hank Fisher would tell how hed tried to break into the house and couldnt and thered be others who would try to break into the house and thered be hell to pay. Enoch sweated, thinking of it. All the years of keeping out of peoples 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.Ch. 18

— Clifford D. Simak people

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.Ch. 19

— Clifford D. Simak fear

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. Its 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.Ch. 21

— Clifford D. Simak time

Its 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.Ch. 21

— Clifford D. Simak spiritual

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, thered always be so much more knowledge than hed gathered at the moment that the little he had gathered would always seem a pittance.Ch. 23

— Clifford D. Simak knowledge

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.Ch. 30

— Clifford D. Simak intelligence

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.Ch. 30

— Clifford D. Simak truth

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 hed spent there had shaped toward this hour and end, to this single instant on this restricted slope of ground.Ch. 32

— Clifford D. Simak war

There is a certain rapport, a sensitivity — I dont 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 creatures mind, aided by the mechanism, that brings the force to us.Ch. 33

— Clifford D. Simak spiritual

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.Ch. 34

— Clifford D. Simak god

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.Ch. 35

— Clifford D. Simak self

One thing more, son. Do you believe in God? Slowly Frost put the spoon back into the bowl. He asked: You really want an answer? I want an answer, said the man. I want an honest one. The answer, said Frost, is that I dont know. Not, certainly, in the kind of God that you are thinking of. Not the old white-whiskered, woodcut gentleman. But a supreme being — yes, I would believe in a God of that sort. Because it seems to me there must be some sort of force or power or will throughout the universe. The universe is too orderly for it to be otherwise. When you measure all this orderliness, from the mechanism of the atom at one end of the scale, out to the precision of the operation of the universe at the other end, it seems unbelievable that there is not a supervisory force of some kind, a benevolent ruling force to maintain that sort of order.

— Clifford D. Simak god

Could it be possible, Hezekiah asked himself, that there was no room for both the faith and truth, that they were mutually exclusive qualities that could not coexist? He shuddered as he thought of it, for if this should be the case, they had spent their centuries of devotion to but little purpose, pursuing a will-o-the-wisp. Must faith be exactly that, the willingness and ability to believe in the face of a lack of evidence? If one could find the evidence, would then the faith be dead? If that were the situation, then which one did they want? Had it been, he wondered, that men had tried what they even now were trying and had realized that there was no such thing as truth, but only faith, and being unable to accept the faith without its evidence, had dropped the faith as well?Ch 7

— Clifford D. Simak truth

The sun was setting, throwing a fog-like dusk across the stream and trees, and there was a coolness in the air. It was time, I knew, to be getting back to camp. But I did not want to move. For I had the feeling that this was a place, once seen, that could not be seen again. If I left and then came back, it would not be the same; no matter how many times I might return to this particular spot the place and feeling would never be the same, something would be lost or something would be added, and there never would exist again, through all eternity, all the integrated factors that made it what it was in this magic moment.

— Clifford D. Simak time

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 hed 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 thered 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 thered be no boredom

— Clifford D. Simak life

Time is still the great mystery to us. It is no more than a concept; we dont know if it even exists

— Clifford D. Simak time

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 time

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 universe

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 man

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 feeling

Were very close to immortal, you know. The time mechanism keeps it that way. No, I hadnt known, said Boone. Inside the time bubble we do not age. We age only when we are outside of it.

— Clifford D. Simak time

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 intelligence

What your friend told you of his seeing of the time wall is true, Henry said in Boones 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 theres something strange, but dont know what it is.

— Clifford D. Simak time

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. Ive 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 time

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 ones shoulders and going back to the selfishness of the child who romped and frolicked without thought of consequence or liability?

— Clifford D. Simak humanity

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 time

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 you

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 end

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 art

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

— Clifford D. Simak time

Without Simak, science fiction would have been without its most humane element, its most humane spokesman for the wisdom of the ordinary person and the value of life lived close to the land.James Gunn

— Clifford D. Simak life

This is a fixup novel; the eight chapters correspond to eight previously published stories. Many editions of the novel have been published.

— Clifford D. Simak man

— Clifford D. Simak truth

We said, theres another second gone, theres 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 time

Time is still the great mystery to us. It is no more than a concept; we dont know if it even exists.

— Clifford D. Simak time

Without consciousness and intelligence, the universe would lack meaning.

— Clifford D. Simak intelligence

It was a place without a single feature of the space-time matrix that he knew. It was a place where nothing yet had happened - an utter emptiness. There was neither light nor dark: there was nothing here but emptiness.

— Clifford D. Simak time

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?

— Clifford D. Simak light

— Clifford D. Simak time

When I talk of the purpose of life, I am thinking not only of human life, but of all life on Earth and of the life which must exist upon other planets throughout the universe.

— Clifford D. Simak life

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

— Clifford D. Simak stories

If the means were available, we could trace our ancestry - yours and mine - back to the first blob of life-like material that came into being on the planet

— Clifford D. Simak life

It is only of life on Earth, however, that one can speak with any certainty. It seems to me that all life on Earth, the sum total of life upon the Earth, has purpose

— Clifford D. Simak life

Less than an hour before hed congratulated himself on escaping all the traps of Earth, all the snares of Man. Not knowing that the greatest trap of all, the final and the fatal trap, lay on this present planet.

— Clifford D. Simak art

Must faith be exactly that, the willingness and ability to believe in the face of a lack of evidence? If one could find the evidence, would then the faith be dead?

— Clifford D. Simak faith

It seems to me, thinking of it, that there must be some universal plan which set in motion the orbiting of the electrons about the nucleus and the slower, more majestic orbit of the galaxies about one another to the very edge of space

— Clifford D. Simak thinking

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 man

And time itself? Time was a never-ending medium that stretched into the future and the past - except there was no future and no past, but an infinite number of brackets, extending either way, each bracket enclosing its single phase of the Universe

— Clifford D. Simak time

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

— Clifford D. Simak time

We thought all the time that we were passing through time when we really werent, when we never have. Weve just been moving along with time.

— Clifford D. Simak time

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

— Clifford D. Simak art

This is written in the elder days as the Earth rides close to the rim of eternity, edging nearer to the dying Sun, into which her two inner companions of the solar system have already plunged to a fiery death. The Twilight of the Gods is history; and our planet drifts on and on into that oblivion from which nothing escapes, to which time itself may be dedicated in the final cosmic reckoning.

— Clifford D. Simak god

I did not want to move. For I had the feeling that this was a place, once seen, that could not be seen again. If I left and then came back, it would not be the same; no matter how many times I might return to this particular spot the place and feeling would never be the same, something would be lost or something would be added, and there never would exist again, through all eternity, all the integrated factors that made it what it was in this magic moment.

— Clifford D. Simak time

Once there had been joy, but now there was only sadness, and it was not, he knew, alone the sadness of an empty house; it was the sadness of all else, the sadness of the Earth, the sadness of the failures and the empty triumphs.

— Clifford D. Simak art

Much of what we see in the universe ... starts out as imaginary. Often you must imagine something before you can come to terms with it.

— Clifford D. Simak art

You still could go to some industry or some university or the government and if you could persuade them you had something on the ball—why, then, they might put up the cash after cutting themselves in on just about all of the profits. And, naturally, theyd run the show because it was their money and all you had done was the sweating and the bleeding.

— Clifford D. Simak money

This is the very center of everything there is. A huge black hole eating up the galaxy. The end of everything.

— Clifford D. Simak end

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 life

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