M. Clarke Quotes

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

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Meteorites don’t fall on the Earth. They fall on the Sun and the Earth gets in the way.” - John W. Campbell

…once science had declared a thing possible, there was no escape from its eventual realization…

This is only a work of fiction, The Truth as always will be far stranger

This is the real way a friendship ends. Not with some huge screaming row, but with a gradual withdrawal. You’d think it would be less painful this way.

The difference between a politician and a statesman is that a politician thinks about the next election while the statesman think about the next generation.

Didn’t somebody once say ‘Politics is the art of the possible’?” “Quite true—which is why only second-rate minds go into it. Genius likes to challenge the impossible.

He that walks into the political marsh cannot come out with polished boots.

[T]hese leaders must not believe they are actually being watched, for their behavior in no way reflects the possible existence of a set of values or ethical laws that supersedes their own dominion.

There's a side to all writers that loves nothing better than a book, a big chair, a window.

She had thought about that moment so often during the past few years it had dried out. It was stale, like old, odourless potpourri. But she still want back to it, because it was the only one.

Where have they gone?" "Wherever magicians used to go. Behind the sky. On the other side of the rain.

...a well-stocked mind is safe from boredom.

Let us say that you might have become a telepathic cancer, a malignant mentality which in its inevitable dissolution would have poisoned other and greater minds.

One wrong social move---say---like hanging with the wrong person, ” she said nastily, “Can make your life around here a living nightmare and I definitely don’t think that you want that.

The Chairman glared across three hundred and eighty thousand kilometers of space at Conrad Taylor, who reluctantly subsided, like a volcano biding its time.

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

Three million years! The infinitely crowded panorama of written history, with its empires and its kings, its triumphs and its tragedies, covered barely one thousandth of this appalling span of time.

If my decision is wrong, at least I will have learned something new. There is always next time.

Well the sun’s the light of everything, ya know?” She said. “Without it, everything would be dark. We wouldn’t have anything. Everything needs a little light to exist. Even darkness.

We don’t sleep to sleep, dammit, any more than we eat to eat . We sleep to dream. We’re amphibians. We live in two elements and we need both." Edward Nesbit

It might well appear to Sir Walter that there had been no quarrel. It was often the case that gentlemen did not observe the signs.

For the first time in his centuries of life, doing the right thing didn’t seem like the right thing to do.

She needed him. More than just his blood or the pleasure he offered with his playground of a body, she needed him—and that was far more terrifying than becoming a blood sucking monster.

Poetry is a hook for memory

Can a magician kill a man by magic?” Lord Wellington asked Strange.Strange frowned. He seemed to dislike the question. “I suppose a magician might, ” he admitted, “but a gentleman never could.

But the other Ministers considered that to employ a magician was one thing, novelists were quite another and they would not stoop to it.

When you're writing, you're creating something out of nothing ... A successful piece of writing is like doing a successful piece of m

It seemed that it was not only live magicians which Mr. Norrell despised. He had taken the measure of all the dead ones too and found them wanting.

Above all remember this: that magic belongs as much to the heart as to the head and everything which is done, should be done from love or joy or righteous anger.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.""Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.

Ha!" cried Dr John contemptuously. "Magic! That is chiefly used for killing Frenchmen, is it not?

It is hard to draw any line between compassion and love.

It is the right of a traveller to vent their frustration at every minor inconvenience by writing of it to their friends.

To be perfectly honest, it scared me a little. You get so used to seeing the same thing in the mirror every day you stop thinking about what you look like.

I called no one, and no one called me. I was suffocating with loneliness. The pain was almost physical. I felt like tearing myself apart. I wanted to escape from my own skin.

There is a special sadness in achievement, in the knowledge that a long-desired goal has been attained at last, and that life must now be shaped towards new ends.

It's too late.I chose life too late.

Kind of just existed from day to day, on weird plateau of feeling nothingness.

I wanted to grab his stupid ears and smash his stupid head against the door until his stupid brains leaked out. Instead, I did nothing.

Freedom you earn is more powerful than freedom handed to you.

Sometimes that’s what it takes. Putting it all out there and hoping love wins.

Never, even in his wildest dreams, had his imagination come close to the reality of her.

If there was anything he’d learned in his life, it was to fight fire with fire, and if that didn’t work, piss on the fire to put it out.

She came out of nowhere like a two-by-four against the skull, knocking all common sense out of him and turning him into a walking woody.

Claire, if you don’t move, I will have served two tours of duty only to die in this bed.

She had no doubt in her mind what he was going to do. And while her ever-elusive shred of common sense squealed, “no, ” every thing else in her shouted, “Bring it on.

..the happy hum of humanity.

Oh God, there were so many stars you could have used. What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?