10 quotes
Whatever doubt might rise, he knew that he was right. But the rightness was an intellectual rightness and the doubt emotional.
Time is the Simplest Thing (1961)
The party was beginning to get noisy—not boisterous, but noisy. It was beginning to acquire that stale air of futility to which, in the end, all parties must fall victim.
Time is the Simplest Thing (1961)
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?
Time is the Simplest Thing (1961)
He knew that there was death—that there must be death if there were evolution, that death was one of the mechanisms that biologically spelled progress and advancement for evolutionary species.
Time is the Simplest Thing (1961)
The red thought rose up inside Blaine’s brain: Why not kill him now?
For the killing would come easy. He was an easy man to hate. Not on principle alone, but personally, clear down to his guts.
Time is the Simplest Thing (1961)
They sat for a moment, regarding one another; neither understanding. As if we were two aliens, thought Blaine. With viewpoints that did not come within a million miles of coinciding, and yet they both were men.
Time is the Simplest Thing (1961)
It was authority that turned men suspicious and stern-faced. Authority and responsibility which made them not themselves, but a sort of corporate body that tried to think as a corporate body rather than as a person.
Time is the Simplest Thing (1961)
For this, he realized, was the future. 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—until this very moment when he and his machine had been thrust upon it, intruders who had overstepped their time.
Time is the Simplest Thing (1961)
You sometimes get a thrill at knowing where you are. You’re often filled with wonder, but more often you are puzzled. You are reminded, again and yet again, of how insignificant you are. And there are times when you forget that you are human. You’re just a blob of life—brother to everything that ever existed or ever will exist.
Time is the Simplest Thing (1961)
They’d lived all their life on Earth; they knew nothing but the Earth. They had never really touched an alien concept, and that was all this concept was. It was not really as slimy as it seemed. It was only alien. There were a lot of alien things that could make one’s hair stand up on end while in their proper alien context they were fairly ordinary.
Time is the Simplest Thing (1961)