Quotes by Arthur H. Clark

“At this point, there flashed briefly through Stenton’s horrified mind the memory of that timeless classic, H. G. Wells’s “The Star.” He had first read it as a small boy, and it had helped to spark his interest in astronomy.””

“But many generations had passed since anyone had had a use for a set of seven-figure logarithms, an atlas of the world, and the score of Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony printed, according to the flyleaf, by H. K. Chu & Sons at the City of Pekin in the year AD 2021.””

“Even if, to the naked human eye, a waterfall and a shower of bricks appeared very different, they were really much the same. The tiny “bricks” of H2O were too small to be visible to the unaided senses, but they could be easily discerned by the instruments of the physicists.””

“Arthur C. Clarke is perhaps H.G. Wells’ truest heir not within the confines of science fiction but through the breadth of literature. Clarke, like Wells, was a realist and historian with more than a slash of mysticism, and it is that mysticism (The Time Machine for Wells; Childhood’s End for Clarke) which informed their work, differentiated it from most of their contemporaries and eventually made them central to the canon. Neither thought of himself as a mystic; both were committed rationalists. (Clarke’s 1992 eulogy on the death of Isaac Asimov mourned the loss of this great logical mind “At a time in human history when logic was never more needed.”) But the misty, lost far future of The Time Machine””