All Flesh is Grass Quotes

“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…”
― Clifford D. Simak, All Flesh is Grass

“Our computers have no purpose. They are not alive.” “But if they were alive?” “Well, in that case, I suppose the ultimate purpose would be the storage of a universal data and its correlation.” “That perhaps is right,” they said. “We are living computers.” “Then there is no end for you. You’ll keep on forever.” “We are not sure,” they said. “But …” “Data,” they told me, pontifically, “is the means to one end only—arrival at the truth. Perhaps we do not need universal data to arrive at truth.”
― Clifford D. Simak, All Flesh Is Grass

“Не, мислех си, не можеш да тръгнеш назад през праха на миналите години, през спомените, през събитията, през промените, настъпили в теб и нея, и да се опиташ да си върнеш някой ден или дори час. А и да ти се удаде това, няма да можеш да го очистиш от наслоилия се прах и никога не ще му върнеш предишния блясък. Но може би той никога не е бил бляскъв? Може би ти сам си го измислил такъв през дългите часове на самотата…
Нищо чудно, ако такъв светъл ден или час идва само веднъж в живота на човека, и то не на всеки човек. Възможно е да съществува закон, който да не позволява той да се повтори.”
― Clifford D. Simak, All Flesh is Grass

“Alone and in the silence, I sensed the purpleness - the formless, subtle personality of the things that owned this planet. There was a friendliness, I thought, but a repulsive friendliness, the fawning friendliness of some monstrous beast. And I was afraid.”
― Clifford D. Simak, All Flesh is Grass

“A wailing sound exploded and filled the universe, a shrieking, terrible sound that reverberated and beat against itself. It came so suddenly that it made me jump and stiffen. The sound seemed to fill the world and to dog the sky and it didn’t stop, but kept on and on.”
― Clifford D. Simak, All Flesh is Grass

“It must be wonderful, I thought, to be, not exactly rich, but to have enough so you didn’t have to worry when there was some little thing you wanted, not to have to wonder if it would be all right if you spent the money for it. To be able to live in a house like this, to line the walls with books and have rich draperies and to have more than just one bottle of booze and a place to keep it other than a kitchen shelf.”
― Clifford D. Simak, All Flesh Is Grass

“I stood there on the sidewalk, looking down the street, and I felt hatred for the town—not for the people in it, but for the town itself, for the impersonal geographic concept of one particular place. The town lay dusty and arrogant and smug beyond all telling and it sneered at me and I knew that I had been mistaken in not leaving it when I’d had the chance. I had tried to live with it for very love of it, but I’d been blind to try. I had known what all my friends had known, the ones who’d gone away, but I had closed my mind to that sure and certain knowledge: there was nothing left in Millville to make one stay around. It was an old town and it was dying, as old things always die.”
― Clifford D. Simak, All Flesh Is Grass

“You could not dig back, I thought, through the dust of years, through the memories and the happenings and the changes in yourself—in both your selves—to rescue out of time another day and hour. And even if you found it, you could not dust it clean, you could never make it shine as you remembered it. For perhaps it never had been quite the shining thing that you remembered, perhaps you had burnished it in your longing and your loneliness. And perhaps it was only once in every lifetime (and perhaps not in every lifetime) that a shining moment came. Perhaps there was a rule that it could never come again.”
― Clifford D. Simak, All Flesh Is Grass