The Big Front Yard and Other Stories Quotes

“There was nothing wrong with the front of the house at all. But if the front of the house was all right, that was all that was. For the driveway was chopped off just a few feet beyond the tail end of the pickup and there was no yard or woods or road. There was just a desert – a flat, far-reaching desert, level as a floor, with occasional boulder piles and haphazard clumps of vegetation and all of the ground covered with sand and pebbles. A big blinding sun hung just above a horizon that seemed much too far away and a funny thing about it was that the sun was in the north, where no proper sun should be. It had a peculiar whiteness, too.”
― Clifford D. Simak, The Big Front Yard and Other Stories

“At the door between the kitchen and the living room he stopped and his hands went out to grasp the door jamb as he stared in disbelief at the windows of the living room. It was night outside. There could be no doubt of that. He had seen the fireflies flickering in the brush and weeds and the street lamps had been lit and the stars were out. But a flood of sunlight was pouring through the windows of the living room and out beyond the windows lay a land that was not Willow Bend. “Beasly,” he gasped, “look out there in front!” Beasly looked. “What place is that?” he asked. “That’s what I’d like to know.”
― Clifford D. Simak, The Big Front Yard and Other Stories

“He now had a curved-front house. Although it was, actually, not as simple as all that, for the curvature was not in proportion to what actually would have happened in case of such a feat. The curve was long and graceful and somehow not quite apparent. It was as if the front of the house had been eliminated and an illusion of the rest of the house had been summoned to mask the disappearance. Taine dropped the shovel and the pick and they clattered on the driveway gravel. He put his hand up to his face and wiped it across his eyes, as if to clear his eyes of something that could not possibly be there. And when he took the hand away it had not changed a bit. There was no front to the house.”
― Clifford D. Simak, The Big Front Yard and Other Stories

“He and Beasly went up the gravel driveway in the dark to put the tools away in the garage and there was something funny going on, for there was no garage. There was no garage and there was no front on the house and the driveway was cut off abruptly and there was nothing but the curving wall of what apparently had been the end of the garage. They came up to the curving wall and stopped, squinting unbelieving in the summer dark. There was no garage, no porch, no front of the house at all. It was as if someone had taken the opposite corners of the front of the house and bent them together until they touched, folding the entire front of the building inside the curvature of the bent-together corners.”
― Clifford D. Simak, The Big Front Yard and Other Stories

“whatever money we may need. We’ll figure out a split.” “That’s fine of you,” said Taine mechanically. “Not at all,” Henry insisted, grandly. “It’s just my aggressive, grasping sense of profit. I should be ashamed of myself, cutting in on this.”
― Clifford D. Simak, The Big Front Yard and Other Stories

“That’s the way it goes,” he said. “There are men like you, but not very many of them. Just Yankee tinkerers. You keep messing around with things, trying one thing here and another there and before you know it you come up with something.”
― Clifford D. Simak, The Big Front Yard and Other Stories