Spaceships - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

He looked up at the ship; and the gleaming, metallic tower that was a finger pointing the way to the stars, that was an arm reaching out for the stars.

- A. Bertram Chandler, ''NewWings'' (1948)

The rocket lay on the launching field, blowing out pink clouds of fire and oven heat. The rocket stood in the cold winter morning, making summer with every breath of its mighty exhausts. The rocket made climates, and summer lay for a brief moment upon the land . . .

- Ray Bradbury, ''Rocket Summer'' (1950)

The first Martian vessel descended upon Earth with the slow, stately fall of a grounded balloon.

- Eric Frank Russell, ''Dear Devil'' (1950)

She went down one more step, and let herself look at the rocket. The workmen were still there. The metal dragon swallowed all they fed it, stolid, indifferent, letting itself be stuffed, for now, with bits and pieces of paraphernalia, oddments of fiber and metal, of glass and wood. But all the while it waited, knowing the feast that was coming soon, brooding and hungering for the living flesh that would feed it this night.

- Judith Merril, ''So ProudlyWe Hail'' (1953)

Far removed indeed were these great ships of the starways from the unsteady little rockets of the Twentieth Century. Their dark hulls loomed vast as thunderclouds over the tiny men and vehicles that came and went around them. They rested now, but it was the rest of giants who had been to the far shores of infinity, who knew the ways of distant suns and worlds, whose sides were scarred by the drift of remote nebulae, and who would presently spurn this little planet Earth from beneath them and return into the cosmic glare and gloom that was their home.

- Edmond Hamilton, The Star of Life, revised (1959)

The Drive, to avoid technicalities, was a device somewhat simpler than Woman and considerably more complicated than sex, which caused its vessel to cease to exist here while simultaneously appeared there, by-passing the limitations imposed by the speed of light.

- Theodore Sturgeon, ''If All MenWere Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?'' (1967)

Supercold, superdense fluid flows from those big hairy balls of the starship Theodore Bilko into painboxes. Molecules are energized, atoms are squeezed, electrons are sheared from their primaries, crammed m jammed m slammed, whammed m bammed, shaped, scraped, raped, nuclei ripped apart, smashed into one another, forces whirling and driving madly, something becoming something else, something less, part of that something becoming nothing, energy produced, screams out propulsion tubes crying to the echoing deaf cosmos for relief, release, dying in an attenuating blaze of hyperenergized exhaust, thrusting the Bilko away from N'Alabama into the dark vacuum that surrounds Alquane, thrusting, heaving, hurling her upward. [. . .] This is propulsion by agonized matter.

- Richard A. Lupoff, ''With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama'' (1972)

The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.

- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy (1979)

Picture this: a mobile space colony, supporting more than a million people. No, not a colony, but an organism which can move and grow as long as it can obtain resources and maintain a food supply within its ecology. It's a living organism because it can respond to stimuli through its optical and sensory nervous system. It thinks with the intellects of its human and cybernetic intelligences. And it can reproduce, which is what we expect from a living organism.

- George Zebrowski, Macrolife (1979)

A rocket is the most lavishly expensive transportation ever invented. In a typical rocketship mission half the effort is spent fighting gravity to go up and the other half is spent fighting gravity in letting down - as crashing is considered an unsatisfactory end to a mission.

- Robert A. Heinlein, The Cat WhoWalks throughWalls (1985)