Quotes from Arthur C. Clarke

For the last time, David Bowman slept.

Somehow, he was not in the least surprised, nor was he alarmed. On the contrary, he felt a sense of calm expectation, such as he had once known when the space medics had tested him with hallucinogenic drugs. The world around him was strange and wonderful, but there was nothing to fear.

I would be greatly distressed if this book contributed still further to the seduction of the gullible, now cynically exploited by all the media.

The image of Jupiter, with its ribbons of white cloud, its mottled bands of salmon pink, and the Great Red Spot staring out like a baleful eye, hung steady on the flight-deck projection screen.

like all material things, they were not immune to the corruptions of Time and its patient, unsleeping servant, Entropy.

dying in an exciting situation is much better than living in a boring one.

He broke open the first of the meal packets, and inspected it without enthusiasm. The name on the label—SPACETASTIES—was enough to put him off. And he had grave doubts about the promise printed underneath: 'Guaranteed crumbless'.

For well-bred people do not, after all, care to read about the social gaffes of others.

Finally, I would like to assure my many Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim friends that I am sincerely happy that the religion which Chance has given you has contributed to your peace of mind (and often, as Western medical science now reluctantly admits, to your physical well-being). Perhaps it is better to be un-sane and happy, than sane and un-happy. But it is best of all to be sane and happy.

Dr. Brown considered all engineers to be nothing more than glorified carpenters and plumbers.

We wanted you to have a feel for the size of your habitat, in case you needed that to be more comfortable with the design process.

Why, Robert Singh often wondered, did we give our hearts to friends whose life spans are so much shorter than our own?

One hemisphere was a giant bull's-eye, a series of concentric rings where solid rock had once flowed in kilometer-high ripples under some ancient hammer blow from space.

throbbed into silence… "And that's the way it was—goodbye, wonderful and terrible Twentieth

They found it hard to imagine the smog-choked cities of the Twentieth Century, and the waste, greed, and appalling environmental disasters of the Oil Age.

He was now probably the world's leading authority on the greatest explorer of all time

Tranquillity was not a state of mind that could be sustained for long.

Anything that had happened once on Earth should be expected millions of times elsewhere in the Universe; that was almost an article of faith among scientists.

One sample is poor statistics, my math prof used to say.

Each had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the postage-stamp-size rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort. When he had finished, he would flash back to the complete page and select a new subject for detailed examination.

like everything that was worth doing, that would take time and practice.

Reliability depended on redundancy and automatic checking, and human intervention was much more likely to do harm than good.

He felt confident that when he pulled open the drawer of that desk, he would find a Gideon Bible inside it….

He might himself be putting on a superb act, following the performance by logic alone and with his own strange emotions completely untouched, as an anthropologist might take part in some primitive rite. The fact that he uttered the appropriate sounds, and made the expected responses, really proved nothing at all.