Simak, Clifford D. (Clifford D. Simak)

And that had not been the first time nor had it been the last, but all the years of killing boiled down in essence to that single moment
-- Clifford D. Simak

We thought all the time that we were passing through time when we really weren't, when we never have. We've just been moving along with time. We said, there's another second gone, there's another minute and another hour and another day, when, as a matter of fact the second or the minute or the hour was never gone. It was the same one all the time. It had just moved along and we had moved with it.
-- Clifford D. Simak

One world and then another, running like a chain. One world treading on the heels of another world that plodded just ahead. One world's tomorrow, another world's today. And yesterday is tomorrow, and tomorrow is the past. Except, there wasn't any past. No past, that was, except the figment of remembrance that flitted like a night-winged thing in the shadow of one's mind. No past that one could reach. No pictures painted on the wall of time. No film that one could run backwards and see what-once-had-been... One road was open, but another road was closed. Not closed, of course, for it had never been. For there wasn't any past, there never had been any, there wasn't room for one. Where there should have been a past there was another world.
-- Clifford D. Simak

"There isn't any room," said Joshua. "You travel back along the line of time and you don't find the past, but another world, another bracket of consciousness. The earth would be the same, you see, or almost the same. Same trees, same rivers, same hills, but it wouldn't be the world we know. Because it has lived a different life, it has developed differently. The second back of us is not the second back of us at all, but another second, a totally separate sector of time. We live in the same second all the time. We move along within the bracket of that second, that tiny bit of time that has been allotted to our particular world."
-- Clifford D. Simak

There was no time, Hezekiah had said. No such thing as time in the terms of normal human thought. Time was bracketed and each of its brackets contained a single phase of a universe so vastly beyond human comprehension that it brought a man up short against the impossibility of envisioning it.
-- Clifford D. Simak

And time itself? Time was a never-ending medium that stretched into the future and the past
-- Clifford D. Simak

Back on Man's original Earth, there had been speculation on travelling in time, of going back into yesterday or forward into tomorrow. And now he knew that you could not do it, that the same instant of time remained forever within each bracket, that Man's Earth had ridden the same bubble of the single instant from the time of its genesis and that it would die and come to nothing within that self-same instant.
-- Clifford D. Simak

You could travel in time, of course, but there would be no yesterday and no tomorrow. But if you held a certain time sense you could break from one bracket to another, and when you did you would not find yesterday or tomorrow, but another world.
-- Clifford D. Simak

There was a world of mutants, men and women who were more than normal men and women, persons who had certain human talents and certain human understandings which the normal men and women of the world had never known, or having known, could not utilize in their entirety, unable to use intelligently all the mighty powers which lay dormant in their brains.
-- Clifford D. Simak

t was a place without a single feature of the space-time matrix that he knew. It was a place where nothing yet had happened
-- Clifford D. Simak

This was the past and it was the dead past; there were only corpses in it
-- Clifford D. Simak

There were certain basic things, perhaps
-- Clifford D. Simak

He was, he realized with a shock, the only living thing existing in this moment on this earth. He and nothing else...
-- Clifford D. Simak

Once again the universe was spread far out before him and it was a different and in some ways a better universe, a more diagrammatic universe, and in time, he knew, if there were such a thing as time, he'd gain some completer understanding and acceptance of it.
-- Clifford D. Simak

He probed and sensed and learned and there was no such thing as time, but a great foreverness.
-- Clifford D. Simak

Yet he really did not know what he saw or probed; he merely sensed and felt it and became a part of it, and it became a part of him
-- Clifford D. Simak

There was no time, no space, no fear, no wonder
-- Clifford D. Simak

Perhaps all that had happened had been no more than the working out of human destiny. If the human race could not attain directly the paranormal power he held, this instinct of the mind, then they would gain it indirectly through the agency of one of their creations.
-- Clifford D. Simak

Without consciousness and intelligence, the universe would lack meaning.
-- Clifford D. Simak

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