2010 Quotes

“What was more, they had taken the first step toward genuine friendship. They had exchanged vulnerabilities.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two

“It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two

“After their encounter on the approach to Jupiter, there would aways be a secret bond between them---not of love, but of tenderness, which is often more enduring.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two

“All human plans [are] subject to ruthless revision by Nature, or Fate, or whatever one preferred to call the powers behind the Universe.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two

“Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference; we should each be treated with appropriate respect.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two

“Humor was the enemy of desire.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two

“ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS, EXCEPT EUROPA.
ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE.
USE THEM TOGETHER. USE THEM IN PEACE.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two

“And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped. And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two

“Some dangers are so spectacular and so much beyond normal experience that the mind refuses to accept them as real, and watches the approach of doom without any sense of apprehension. The man who looks at the onrushing tidal wave, the descending avalanche, or the spinning funnel of the tornado, yet makes no attempt to flee, is not necessarily paralyzed with fright or resigned to an unavoidable fate. He may simply be unable to believe that the message of his eyes concerns him personally. It is all happening to somebody else.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two

“Floyd could imagine a dozen things that could go wrong; it was little consolation that it was always the thirteenth that actually happened.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two

“Good morning, Dr. Chandra. This is Hal. I am ready for my first lesson.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two

“The core of Jupiter, forever beyond human reach, was a diamond as big as the Earth.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two

“Men knew better than they realized, when they placed the abode of the gods beyond the reach of gravity.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two

“He left the unspoken question hanging in the air. How did one annoy a two- kilometre-long black rectangular slab? And just what form would its disapproval take”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two

“They had not yet attained the stupefying boredom of omnipotence; their experiments did not always succeed.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two

“In a rare flash of humor, she had replied: “Woody, a commander can be wrong, but never uncertain.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two

“Astronomy was full of such intriguing but meaningless coincidences. The most famous was the fact that, from the Earth, both Sun and Moon have the same apparent diameter.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two

“But it had been widely argued that advanced intelligence could never arise in the sea; there were not enough challenges in so benign and unvarying an environment.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two

“This hydrogen was under such enormous pressure that it had become a metal.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two

“Woody, a commander can be wrong, but never uncertain.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two

“A major part of his job was deciding when warnings could be ignored, when they could be dealt with at leisure—and when they had to be treated as real emergencies. If he paid equal attention to all the ship’s cries for help, he would never get anything done. He”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two

“They had not yet attained the stupefying boredom of absolute omnipotence;”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two

“When 2001 was written, Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto were mere pinpoints of light in even the most powerful telescope; now they are worlds, each unique, and one of them—Io—is the most volcanically active body in the Solar System.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two

“The time has come,” said Dr. Dimitri Moisevitch to his old friend Heywood Floyd, “to talk of many things. Of shoes and spaceships and sealing wax, but mostly of monoliths and malfunctioning computers.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two

“Floyd made it a rule never to worry about events over which he could have absolutely no control; any external threat would reveal itself in due time and must be dealt with then. But he could not help wondering if they had done”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two

“Well, Io is Mordor: Look up Part Three. There’s a passage about ‘rivers of molten rock that wound their way… until they cooled and lay like twisted dragon-shapes vomited from the tormented earth.’ That’s a perfect description: how did Tolkien know, a quarter century before anyone ever saw a picture of Io? Talk about Nature imitating Art.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two

“The crew of Apollo 8, who at Christmas, 1968, became the first men ever to set eyes upon the Lunar Farside, told me that they had been tempted to radio back the discovery of a large black monolith: alas, discretion prevailed.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two

“Once is an accident; twice is a coincidence; three times is a conspiracy.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two

“Anything that had happened once on Earth should be expected millions of times elsewhere in the Universe; that was almost an article of faith among scientists.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two

“But economical Mother Nature was always repeating herself, on such vastly different scales as the swirl of milk stirred into coffee, the cloud lanes of a cyclonic storm, the arms of a spiral nebula.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two