Clifford D. Simak Quotes

… man has flown in the face of everything he knew time after time. He knew, not too many hundreds of years ago, that the Earth was the centre of the universe. He knew, less than thirty years ago, that man could never travel to the other planets. He knew, a hundred years ago, that the atom was indivisible. And what have we here—the knowledge that time never can be understood or manipulated, that it is impossible for a plant to be intelligent. I tell you, sir...

As long as one was on his feet, he fought, and even when he was down and could not get up, he did not admit defeat.

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All Flesh is Grass

Struggle

I shouldn't have called them characters to start with. They're individualists. They've grown up in a free and easy atmosphere. They've not been forced to conform to a group of rigid concepts and so they've been themselves. Perhaps the only truly unfettered human beings who still exist today can be found in little villages like this.

My mouth got set to tell a lie, and then I stopped. What the hell, I thought. This man across from me was old Alf Peterson, one of my best friends. There was no point in telling him a lie. There was no pride involved. He was too good a friend for pride to be involved.

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 travelled.

They chatted and pretended to be light-hearted, and Maitland tried a joke which fell flat upon its face and died, squirming beneath the insincerity of the laughter that its telling had called forth.

And I realized that perhaps at no time in my life had I ever known silence. Always there had been something that had made some sort of noise — the chirring of a lone insect in the quiet of a summer noon, or the rustle of a leaf. Even in the dead of night there would have been the creaking of the timbers in the house, the murmur of the furnace, the slight keening of a wind that ran along the eaves.

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All Flesh is Grass

Silence

A thing is never ugly to itself because it knows itself. Have we any proof that bipedal man is any happier than an insect or a toad?

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Shadow Show

Thrown into this sort of situation, it was only natural that the people of the village should be avid to grasp at any sort of interpretation that might clear their names and set them right, not only with themselves, but with the aliens and the world; that they should be willing to believe anything at all (the worst or best), to embrace all rumours, to wallow in outlandish speculation, to attempt to paint the entire picture in contrasting black and white (even when they knew that all of it was grey), because in this direction of blackness and of whiteness lay the desired simplicity that served an easier understanding and a comfortable acceptance.

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All Flesh is Grass

There is a streak of cruelty <…> that runs through the human race. You find it everywhere you look, on every page of recorded history. Man is not satisfied with inflicting death alone, he must inflict it with many painful frills. A boy pulls the wings off flies and ties tin cans to a dog's tail. The Assyrians flayed screaming thousands while they were still alive. <…> The Aztecs <…> cut out the hearts of their living sacrifices with a blunt stone knife. The Saxons threw men into the serpent pits or flayed them living and rubbed salt into the quivering flesh as the pelt peeled off.
<…> he called up the bloody sadism that had left a trail of blood and pain across the centuries, linking the old Egyptian king whose proudest title had been the Cracker of Foreheads to the man whose smoking revolver piled the dead knee-deep in Russian cellars.

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