“What was more, they had taken the first step toward genuine friendship. They had exchanged vulnerabilities.”
“It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything.”
“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.”
“All human plans [are] subject to ruthless revision by Nature, or Fate, or whatever one preferred to call the powers behind the Universe.”
“Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference; we should each be treated with appropriate respect.”
“Humor was the enemy of desire.”
“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.”
“Floyd could imagine a dozen things that could go wrong; it was little consolation that it was always the thirteenth that actually happened.”
“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.”
“ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS, EXCEPT EUROPA.
ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE.
USE THEM TOGETHER. USE THEM IN PEACE.”
“Good morning, Dr. Chandra. This is Hal. I am ready for my first lesson.”
“They had not yet attained the stupefying boredom of omnipotence; their experiments did not always succeed.”
“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.”
“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”
“Men knew better than they realized, when they placed the abode of the gods beyond the reach of gravity.”
“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”
“This hydrogen was under such enormous pressure that it had become a metal.”
“The core of Jupiter, forever beyond human reach, was a diamond as big as the Earth.”
“They had not yet attained the stupefying boredom of absolute omnipotence;”
“In a rare flash of humor, she had replied: “Woody, a commander can be wrong, but never uncertain.”
“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”
“Woody, a commander can be wrong, but never uncertain.”
“How foolish that expectation had been! He knew now that one might as well hope to see the wind, or speculate about the true shape of fire.”
“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.”
“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.”
“His mind wandered, seeking other examples. People—particularly older ones—still spoke of putting film into a camera, or gas into a car. Even the phrase “cutting a tape” was still sometimes heard in recording studios—though that embraced two generations of obsolete technologies.”
“This would involve disconnection—the computer equivalent of death. Despite”
“Hal in full control of the ship. The”
“For the last time, David Bowman slept.”
“The image of Jupiter, with its ribbons of white cloud, its mottled bands of salmon pink, and the Great Red Spot staring out like a baleful eye, hung steady on the flight-deck projection screen.”
“But because of his telling, many who did not believe have come to believe, and some who did not care have come to care. He tells the story, out of infinite pain, partly to honor the dead, but also to warn the living - to warn the living that it could happen again and that it must never happen again. Better than one heart be broken a thousand times in the retelling, he has decided, if it means that a thousand other hearts need not be broken at all. (vi)”
“If they would rather die, . . . they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
“You made your own jean shorts...with a butter knife?”
“Human beings are remarkable - at what we can learn to live with. If we couldn't get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can't have, then we couldn't ever get strong enough, could we? What else makes us strong?”
“And here was a man who lived on belief, but who sacrificed it at the first challenge, right when he needed it most.”
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