Quotes from Clifford D. Simak

But the bars that held you, the bars that kept you in were the luxury and soft living. It is hard to walk out on a thing like that

The walls cried out to him. And voices cried out as well from the shadow of the past. He stood and listened to them, and now a strange thing struck him. The voices were there, but he did not hear the words.

A yellow leaf fluttered down from overhead and settled in his lap, a clear, almost transparent yellow against the brownness of the robe. He moved to brush it off and then he let it stay. For who am I, he thought, to interfere with or dispute even such a simple thing as the falling of a leaf. He

In this room, he told himself, history might have been written, the course of cosmic empire might have been shaped and the fate of stars decided. But now there was no sign of life, just a brooding silence that seemed to whisper in a tongueless language of days and faces and problems long since wiped out by the march of years.

Adams chuckled. "The evenings are always nice. The Weather boys don't let it rain until later on, when everyone's asleep.

For 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 mater 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 have moved with it.

Until the last man threw away his weapon (any sort of weapon), the tribe of Man could not be at peace.

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.

She was a creature of the woods and hills, of springtime flower and autumn flight of birds. She knew these things and lived with them and was, in some strange way, a specific part of them. She was one who dwelt apart in an old and lost apartment of the natural world. She occupied a place that Man long since had abandoned, if, in fact, he'd ever held it.

For what need was there to go anywhere? It all was here. By simply twirling a dial one could talk face to face with anyone wished, could go, by sense, if not in body, anywhere one wished. Could attend the theater or hear a concert or browse in a library halfway around the world. Could transact any business one might need to transact without rising from one's chair. Webster

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…

The whole procedure of his thinking, Jason knew, was an imbecilic exercise; there was no compelling reason for him to seek an answer. And yet his mind bored on and on and he could not stop it, hanging with desperation to an impossibility to which it never should have paid attention.

Has it ever occurred to you that business as you think of it may have outlived its usefulness? Business has made its contribution and the world moves on. Business is just another dodo. . . .

Your kind of politics is dead. They are dead because any tinhorn with a loud mouth and a brassy front could gain power by appeal to mob psychology. And you haven't got mob psychology anymore. You can't have mob psychology when people don't give a damn what happens to a thing that's dead already—a political system that broke down under its own weight.

We have fallen on hard times of the spirit, with many of the people more concerned with fear of evil than contemplation of the good.

And that day the cultural god of science had shone a bit less brightly, had died a little in the people's minds.

Your kind of politics is dead. They are dead because any tinhorn with a loud mouth and a brassy front could gain power by appeal to mob psychology.

It had been in that moment that he had realized the insanity of war, the futile gesture that in time became all but meaningless, the unreasoning rage that must be nursed long beyond the memory of the incident that had caused the rage, the sheer illogic that one man, by death of misery, might prove a right or uphold a principle.

Squatted beside the fire, with the warmth of it upon his face and hands, he felt a smug contentment that seemed strangely out of place--the contentment of a man who had reduced his needs to the strictly basic--and with the contentment came a full-bodied confidence that was just as out of place.

Unconventional," said Jenkins. "What is conventional?" asked Andrew. "Living in a dream? Living for a memory? you must be weary of it." "Not

He sat there thinking of Man's capacity for the wiping out of species--sometimes in hate or fear, at other times for the simple love of gain.

Had the memory worn thin? Had the debt he owed been paid? Had he discharged the last ounce of devotion? "There are worlds out there," Andrew was saying, "and life on some of them. Even some intelligence. There is work to do." He

But when a tree speaks to one, what is one to do? On

Good man, Thorne, thought Adams.