Arthur C. Clarke

"Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software."

"Perhaps, as some wit remarked, the best proof that there is Intelligent Life in Outer Space is the fact it hasn't come here. Well, it can't hide forever - one day we will overhear it."

"Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering."

"The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible."

"The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible."

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

"If man can live in Manhattan, he can live anywhere."

"Magic's just science that we don't understand yet."

"How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when it is clearly Ocean."

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

"In accordance with the terms of the Clarke-Asimov treaty, the second-bestscience writer dedicates this book to the second-best science-fictionwriter.[dedication to Isaac Asimov from Arthur C. Clarke in his book Report on Planet Three]"

"The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible."

"Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying."

"I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too intelligent to come here."

"But most of the time, with a contented resignation that comes normally to a man only at the end of a long and busy life, he sat before the keyboard and filled the air with his beloved Bach. Perhaps he was deceiving himself, perhaps this was some merciful trick of the mind but now it seemed to Jan that this what he had always wished to do. His secret ambition had at last dared to emerge into the full light of consciousness. Jan had always been a good pianist, and now he was the finest in the world."

"Jan had always been a good pianist, and now he was the finest in the world."

"And so Discovery drove on toward Saturn, as often as not pulsating with the cool music of the harpsichord, the frozen thoughts of a brain that had been dust for twice a hundred years."

"Few artists thrive in solitude and nothing is more stimulating than the conflict of minds with similar interests."

"(...)Through the ship's telescopes, he had watched the death of the solar system. With his own eyes, he had seen the volcanoes of Mars erupt for the first time in a billion years; Venus briefly naked as her atmosphere was blasted into space before she herself was consumed; the gas giants exploding into incandescent fireballs. But these were empty, meaningless spectacles compared with the tragedy of Earth. That, too, he had watched through the lenses of cameras that had survived a few minutes longer than the devoted men who had sacrificed the last moments of their lives to set them up. He had seen ... the Great Pyramid, glowing dully red before it slumped into a puddle of molten stone ... the floor of the Atlantic, baked rock-hard in seconds, before it was submerged again, by the lava gushing from the volcanoes of the Mid-ocean Rift... the Moon rising above the flaming forests of Brazil and now itself shining almost as brilliantly as had the Sun, on its last setting, only minutes before ... the continent of Antarctica emerging briefly after its long burial, as the kilometres of ancient ice were burned away ... the mighty central span of the Gibraltar Bridge, melting even as it slumped downward through the burning air ... In that last century the Earth was haunted with ghosts - not of the dead, but of those who now could never be born. For five hundred years the birthrate had been held at a level that would reduce the human population to a few millions when the end finally came. Whole cities - even countries - had been deserted as mankind huddled together for History's closing act."

"Sometimes, during the lonely hours on the control deck, Bowman would listen to this radiation. He would turn up the gain until the room filled with a crackling, hissing roar; out of this background, at irregular intervals, emerged brief whistles and peeps like the cries of demented birds. It was an eerie sound, for it had nothing to do with Man; it was as lonely and meaningless as the murmur of waves on a beach, or the distant crash of thunder beyond the horizon."