Bob Shaw > Quotes

“No amount of standing on hilltops on dark nights and surveying the heavens could prepare a man for the actuality of space travel, because the earthbound observer saw only the the stars, not what separated them. They glittered in his vision, filling his eyes, and he had no choice but to assign them a position of importance in the cosmic scheme. The space traveler saw things differently. He was made aware that the universe consisted of emptiness, that the suns and nebulae were almost an irrelevancy, that the stars were nothing more than a whiff of gas diffusing into infinity. And sooner or later that knowledge began to hurt.”
― Bob Shaw, Ship of Strangers

“We of the Twentieth Century have abandoned the practice of holding something in reserve when we love our children, assuming – as our ancestors would never have dared to do – that they will reach adulthood as a matter of course.”
― Bob Shaw, Tomorrow Lies in Ambush

“Fortune accepted that he could not become a helpless, blameless baby again and yet he was strangely satisfied at the prospect of being carried upwards into the receptive convexities of the clouds.”
― Bob Shaw, Tomorrow Lies in Ambush

“It was the old trouble with cultural first contacts—no matter what object the explorer pointed at he risked being given the word for finger.”
― Bob Shaw, The Palace of Eternity

“As always when a personal encounter put him under stress, a whirling confusion scattered his powers of thought, organic valves opened and the skin of his cheeks began to heat up.”
― Bob Shaw, The Palace of Eternity

“Tavernor felt his elation increase—he was on the brink of understanding something important—and then, because the emotion was a product of his individuality, the nebulous contact was lost, with an accelerating yearning slide into normalcy. There was a moment of disappointment, but even that vanished into something less than a memory.”
― Bob Shaw, The Palace of Eternity

“The savages must come to us,”
― Bob Shaw, The Ragged Astronauts: Land and Overland Book 1

“E, onnipresenti, i bambini, traditi in modo totale ancor prima di nascere.”
― Bob Shaw

“There was the great enigma—that the brevity of a man’s life did not drive him into continuous swarming activity. The ability to surrender gladly to sleep, the death of each day’s life, was one of the best intimations of immortality that Hal could conceive. But, if man’s spirit was immortal, what was the purpose of the transient glimmer of physical existence?”
― Bob Shaw, The Palace of Eternity

“Running down the hill is good, a warm voice said, because your strides are long and easy, and entropy is a following wind, speeding you to dissolution, which is merely rest under a different name.”
― Bob Shaw, The Palace of Eternity

“His eyes had a heavy, nostalgic look, as if peering into the past, or into a future which was never going to exist.”
― Bob Shaw, The Palace of Eternity