"2001 A Space Odyssey"

[fiefoe]

I wonder which one is Arthur C. Clarke's prouder invention, the murdering Hal or star-child. His language conveys much wonder of this universe, which is almost too overwhelming to a person (again) suffering from a cold.

• The tribe lived in the shadow of thirst.
• Of all the creatures who had yet walked on Earth, the man-apes were the first to look steadfastly at the Moon.
• Discontent had come into his soul, and he had taken one small step toward humanity.
• ... The future of a world wating upon their decision. It was a surprsingly long time before one of the nursing females began to lick the gory stone she was holding in her paws.
• The stone club, the toothed saw, the horn dagger, the bone scraper - these were the marvelous inventions which the man-apes needed in order to survive.
• With an immense effor of imagination, he visualized the dead antelope - in the safety of his own cave.
• The toolmakers had been remade by their own tools.
• They had learned to speak, and so had won their first great victory over Time. Now the knowledge of one generation could be handed to the next.
• da Vinci: The Great Bird will take its flight on the back of the great bird, bringing glory to the nest where it was born.
• Someone had once said that you could be terrified in space, but you could not be worried there.
• The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be.
• Three million years! The infinitely crowded panorama of written history, with its empires and its kings, ints triumphs and its tragedies, ocvered barley one thousandth of this appalling span of time.
• As the Moon swung back and forth in its orbit, it shone down like a great lamp upon the darkened seas and continents of Earth.
• (The meteor) was the only solid matter they would meet this side of Jupiter - still two hundred million miles away.
• Like a ball on a cosmic pool table, Discovery had bounced off the moving gravitation field of Jupiter, and had gained momentum from the impact.
• 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.
• But no one had ever given the slightest thought to the curious coincidence that the rings of Saturn had been born at the same time as the human race.
• And because, in all the galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped.
• One by one she would cut through the orbits of Janus, Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, Titan, Hyperion... worlds bearing the names of gods and goddesses who had vanished only yesterday, as time was counted here.
• "Oh my God! - it's full of stars!"