16 quotes
Before Man goes to the stars he should learn how to live on Earth.
Time and Again (1951)
It would be three-dimensional chess with a million billion squares and a million pieces, and with the rules changing ever move.
Time and Again (1951)
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.
Time and Again (1951)
“It wouldn’t be the truth,” said Sutton.
“That,” said Trevor, “doesn’t have a thing to do with it.”
Time and Again (1951)
You either obey a law or you forfeit it. You can’t forget it with one breath and invoke it with the next.
Time and Again (1951)
They are worse than the disinherited. They are not the has-beens, they are the never-weres.
Time and Again (1951)
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.
Time and Again (1951)
“It’s a wonder to me,” said Adams sourly, “that you don’t simply melt down in the white heat of your brilliance.”
Time and Again (1951)
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.
Time and Again (1951)
Memory and dust, he thought, link us to the past.
Time and Again (1951)
Dreams, she said. Broken dreams are bad enough. But the dream that has no hope...the dream that is doomed long before it’s broken, that’s the worst of all.
Time and Again (1951)
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.
Time and Again (1951)
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.
Time and Again (1951)
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.
Time and Again (1951)
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.
Time and Again (1951)
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.
Time and Again (1951)