Clifford D. Simak · 191 pages
Rating: (1.4K votes)
“For 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 a person.”
“Whatever doubt might rise, he knew that he was right. But the rightness was an intellectual rightness and the doubt emotional.”
“Has it ever occurred to you that business as you think of it may have outlived its usefulness? Business has made its contribution and the world moves on. Business is just another dodo. . . .”
“We have fallen on hard times of the spirit, with many of the people more concerned with fear of evil than contemplation of the good.”
“And that day the cultural god of science had shone a bit less brightly, had died a little in the people's minds.”
“The pendulum had swung too far, as always, and now was swinging back, and the horror of intolerance had been loosed upon the land.”
“Squatted beside the fire, with the warmth of it upon his face and hands, he felt a smug contentment that seemed strangely out of place--the contentment of a man who had reduced his needs to the strictly basic--and with the contentment came a full-bodied confidence that was just as out of place.”
“But the bars that held you, the bars that kept you in were the luxury and soft living. It is hard to walk out on a thing like that”
“He sat there thinking of Man's capacity for the wiping out of species--sometimes in hate or fear, at other times for the simple love of gain.”
“I trade with you my mind.”
“He turned to Edwin. "You know, the stuff you just told me makes more sense than all the weird things the counselors and psychologist have told me in school and at the detention center."
Edwin tapped Cole's shoulder with the broken stick. "That's because those people still think you can get rid of the left end of the stick.”
“We have not meet our destination till we are there for sure.”
“By birth, certainly, they were not prepared in any way to achieve their desires. They were not the smartest kids in the neighborhood. They were not born the richest. They weren’t even the toughest. In fact, they lacked almost all the necessary talents that might have helped them satisfy the appetites of their dreams, except one—their talent for violence.”
“I glanced over his shoulder to get a look at his latest drawing. A wolf and a coyote stood side by side beneath a dual sky, sun and moon shining at the same time.
"They're brothers," Rafael said. He laid his charcoal on the grass. "Wolf is wise and judicious. Coyote's a trickster. They're the two faces of God. Everything in the world is dual-natured. Even God isn't all good or all bad."
He told me about how the sun used to be married to the moon before they quarreled and parted ways, leaving the sun to rule the world at day and the moon at night. He told me how the Wolf had sewn us all out of seeds and put us in a cloth bag to keep us safe, but the Coyote had clawed the bag open and everyone had spilled out, landing and taking root in different parts of the world. He told me about the girl with Two Faces, one half of her face devastatingly beautiful, the other half impossibly ugly, and the man who lover her anyway. He told me about the days when death lacked permanence and ten different generations lived together beneath the same stars.
He talked, as he always talked, without any real purpose, clearing his head of the cluttering thoughts that had gathered and built up until he could pour them into me.”
“I have to push ahead with the people who don't take the easy way out, who love me enough to stay alive even whe life sucks”
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