Perkins: You can get a handle of some kind on any living man. Not necessarily in his past, you understand — I know that anything like that is out of the question in this case — but in his future. With some men it is money, with others power, with others fame…
Book 1928
The Skylark of Space quotes
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About the book
Government chemist Richard Seaton accidentally discovers a way to release the energy locked inside copper, and with his millionaire friend Martin Crane he builds the Skylark, a ship that can cross interstellar space. A ruthless rival scientist, Marc DuQuesne, and the corporation behind him will stop at nothing to steal the secret. The chase carries everyone far beyond the solar system to strange worlds and alien civilizations.
6 quotes
The stranger: You're a very inferior race of animals — don't even understand telepathy, don't understand the luminiferous ether, or the relation between time and space. Your greatest things, such as the Skylark and your object-compass, are merely toys.
DuQuesne: Modesty never got anybody anything but praise, and I prefer something more substantial. However, I never exaggerate or make over-statements, as you should know.
Seaton: Suppose it had been liberated all at once? Probably blown the whole world off its hinges. But it wasn't: it was given off slowly and in a straight line. Wonder why? Talk about power! Infinite!
Awed by the immensity of the universe, the two at the window were silent, not with the silence of embarrassment, but with that of two friends in the presence of something beyond the reach of words. As they stared out into the infinity each felt as never…
For the blackness of the interstellar void was not the dark of an earthly night, but the absolute black of the absence of all light, beside which the black of platinum dust is pale and gray; and laid upon this velvet were the jewel stars. They were not the…