75 Quotes & Sayings By Dan Simmons

To see and feel one's beloved naked for the first time is one of life's pure, irreducible epiphanies. If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include that truth of contact or be forever hollow. To make love to the one true person who deserves that love is one of the few absolute rewards of being a human being, balancing all of the pain, loss, awkwardness, loneliness, idiocy, compromise, and clumsiness that go with the human condition. To make love to the right person makes up for a lot of mistakes. . Dan Simmons

I wish we had the technology to fight God on an equal basis. To beard him in his den. To fight back for all of the injustices heaped on humanity. To allow him to alter his smug arrogance or be blown to hell. Dan Simmons

There would be no more offerings. Not this day. Not any day. Humankind had suffered enough for its love of gods, its long search for God. He thought of the many centuries in which his people, the Jews, had negotiated with God, complaining, bickering, decrying the unfairness of things but always - always - returning to obedience at whatever the cost. Generations dying in the ovens of hatred. Future generations scarred by the cold fires of radiation and renewed hatred. . Dan Simmons

When the last autumn of Dickens's life was over, he continued to work through his final winter and into spring. This is how all of us writers give away the days and years and decades of our lives in exchange for stacks of paper with scratches and squiggles on them. And when Death calls, how many of us would trade all those pages, all that squandered lifetime-worth of painfully achieved scratches and squiggles, for just one more day, one more fully lived and experienced day? And what price would we writers pay for that one extra day spent with those we ignored while we were locked away scratching and squiggling in our arrogant years of solipsistic isolation? Would we trade all those pages for a single hour? Or all of our books for one real minute? . Dan Simmons

Religion and ethics were not always - or even frequently - mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often deflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice. Dan Simmons

He loved the darkness and the mystery of the Catholic service--the tall priest strutting like a carrion crow and pronouncing magic in a dead language, the immediate magic of the Eucharist bringing the dead back to life so that the faithful could devour Him and become of Him, the smell of incense and the mystical chanting. Dan Simmons

I explained my opinion of the ship’s logic. “That is a strange designation, ” said the ship. “While I have certain organic elements incorporated into my substructure and decentralized DNA computing components, I am not–in the strictest sense of the term–a biological organism. I have no digestive system. No need for elimination, other than the occasional waste gas and passenger effluvium. Therefore, I have no anus in either real or figurative terms. Therefore, I hardly believe I could qualify to be called an …” “Shut up, ” I said. . Dan Simmons

The beauty of that June day was almost staggering. After the wet spring, everything that could turn green had outdone itself in greenness and everything that could even dream of blooming or blossoming was in bloom and blossom. The sunlight was a benediction. The breezes were so caressingly soft and intimate on the skin as to be embarrassing. Dan Simmons

Tyrena did not laugh again but her smile slashed upward in a twist of green lips. “Martin, Martin, Martin, ” she said, “the population of literate people has been declining steadily since Gutenberg’s day. By the twentieth century, less than two percent of the people in the so-called industrialized democracies read even one book a year. And that was before the smart machines, dataspheres, and user-friendly environments. . Dan Simmons

I take my favorite and most promising lads to the theater, ” said [Sherlock] Holmes. “I'd say that if they were born into better circumstances many would have grown up to be MP’s, but in truth most are too smart and too honest for Parliament. Dan Simmons

... The continuation of her life was more than another day of breathing, but was the gift of another day of engagement with her beloved across the spectrum of all things. Dan Simmons

The shortest route to courage is absolute ignorance. Dan Simmons

His imagination was always more real than the reality of daily life. Dan Simmons

What, after all, is more real to us than the geography of our childhoods? Dan Simmons

To see and feel one's beloved naked for the first time is one of life's pure, irreducible epiphanies. If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include that truth of contact or be forever hollow. Dan Simmons

But, Dad…” She hesitated. “It will mean raising me all over again. It means suffering through my childhood for a third time. No parent should be asked to do that.” Sol managed a smile. “No parent would refuse that, Rachel. Dan Simmons

Who are you, Hockenberry, to thwart Fate and defy the Will of the Gods?I am me, Thomas Hockenberry. I am fed up with these power-addled thugs who call themselves gods. Dan Simmons

Its hard to die. Harder to live Dan Simmons

No lifetime is long enough for those who wish to create, Raul. Or for those who simply wish to understand themselves and their lives. It is, perhaps, the curse of being human, but also a blessing. Dan Simmons

In such seconds of decision entire futures are made Dan Simmons

... you "met" this Moneta. .. or whatever her real name is. .. in her past but your future. .. in a meeting that's still to come Dan Simmons

The words sounded like a mournful incantation. Dan Simmons

In Theo — quiet, efficient Theo — to get him through the morning. Trusting in luck to get him through the day. Trusting in the drinking at Cicero’s to get him through the night. Trusting in the unimportance of his posting to get him through life. Dan Simmons

Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings. Example: the Chinese pictogram for ‘integrity’ is a two-part symbol of a man literally standing next to his word. So far, so good. But what does the Late English word ‘honesty’ mean? Or ‘Motherland’? Or ‘progress’? Or ‘democracy’? Or ‘beauty’? But even in our self-deception, we become gods. . Dan Simmons

She [Beatrice] alone was still real for him, still implied meaning in the world, and beauty. Her nature became his landmark - what Melville would call, with more sobriety than we can now muster, his Greenwich Standard ... Dan Simmons

The past is dead and buried. But I know now that buried things have a way of rising to the surface when one least expects them to. Dan Simmons

All those before us have gone into the darkness without assurance of logic or fact or persuasive theory, with only a slender thread of hope or all too shakable convention of faith. And they have been able to sustain that slim hope in the face of darkness, then so must I. Dan Simmons

All those before us have gone into the darkness without assurance of logic fact or persuasive theory, with only a slender thread of hope or the all too shakable convinction of faith. And if they have been able to sustain that slim hope in the face of darkness, then so must I. Dan Simmons

Pain and darkness have been our lot since the Fall of Man. But there must be some hope that we can rise to a higher level ... that consciousness can evolve to a plane more benevolent than its counterpoint of a universe hardwired to indifference. Dan Simmons

All of our lives are governed by a certain degree of faith in bullshit. Dan Simmons

[The Void Which Binds] actual but unaccessible presence in our universe is one of the prime causes for our species elaborating myth and religion, for our stubborn, blind belief in extrasensory powers, in telepathy and precognition, in demons and demigods and resurrection and reincarnation and ghosts and messiahs and so many other categories of almost-but-not-quite satisfying bullshit. Dan Simmons

You have to live to really know things, my love Dan Simmons

There is a fullness and calmness there which can come only from knowing pain. Dan Simmons

When you've spent thirty years entering rooms filled with strangers you feel less pressure than when you've had only half that number of years of experience. You know what the room and the people in it probably hold for you and you go looking for it. If it's not there, you sense it earlier and leave to go about your business. You just know more about what is, what isn't, and how little time there is to learn the difference. . Dan Simmons

Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings. Dan Simmons

Life is brutal that way... the loss of irrecoverable moments amid trivia and distraction. Dan Simmons

Look, ’ said Tyrena. ‘In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure. Dan Simmons

Reading your sonnets?” asked Orphu. Mahnmut closed the book. “How’d you know? Have you taken up telepathy now that you’ve lost your eyes?” “Not yet, ” rumbled the Ionian. Orphu’s great crab shell was lashed to the deck ten meters from where Mahnmut sat near the bow. “Some of your silences are more literary than others, is all. Dan Simmons

Love was as hardwired into the structure of the universe as gravity and matter. Dan Simmons

... pain has been with him since birth - the universe's gift to a poet ... Dan Simmons

As Ummon and the other Masters teach, it explains why the giraffe evolved a long neck but never why the other animals did not. It explains why humankind evolved to intelligence, but not why the tree near the front gate refused to. Dan Simmons

Evolution is not progress, that there is no ‘goal’ or direction to evolution. Evolution is change. Evolution ‘succeeds’ if that change best adapts some leaf or branch of its tree of life to conditions of the universe. Dan Simmons

I desperately want to talk to her now. I want to ask her who it was who so deftly crafted and shaped the legend that was our love. Dan Simmons

... all good things beyond sleep come precisely because we defy gravity while we live. Dan Simmons

It was as if they had climbed the last hill in creation. Dan Simmons

Sol wanted to know how any ethical system — much less a religion so indomitable that it had survived every evil mankind could throw at it — could flow from a command from God for a man to slaughter his son. It did not matter to Sol that the command had been rescinded at the last moment. It did not matter that the command was a test of obedience. In fact, the idea that it was the obedience of Abraham which allowed him to become the father of all the tribes of Israel was precisely what drove Sol into fits of fury. . Dan Simmons

.. primitive times had required primitive obedience, that later generations evolved to the point where parents offered themselves as sacrifice - as in the dark knights of the ovens which pocked old earth history - and that current generations had to deny any command for sacrifice. Sol had written that whatever God now took in human consciousness - whether as a mere manifestation of the subconscious in all its revanchist needs or as a more conscious attempt at philosophical and ethical evolution - humankind could no longer agree to offer up sacrifice in God's name. Sacrifice and the agreement to sacrifice had written human history in blood. . Dan Simmons

Every age fraught with discord and danger seems to spawn a leader meant only for that age, a political giant whose absence, in retrospect, seems inconceivable when the history of that age is written. Dan Simmons

It no longer matters who consider themselves the masters of events. Events no longer obey their masters. Dan Simmons

The essence of honor lay in the moment of combat between equals. Dan Simmons

Eagles are extinct, " grumbled Morpurgo. "Perhaps they should have attacked the sky. It betrayed them. Dan Simmons

The life of a poet lies not merely in the finite language-dance of expression but in the nearly infinite combinations of perception and memory combined with the sensitivity to what is perceived and remembered. Dan Simmons

The Chinese poet George Wu ... recorded on his comlog: "Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become." Later, on his last disk to his lover the week before he died, Wu said: "Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers. Dan Simmons

That’s what writers and artists and creators do, boy. Listen to the Void and try to hear dead folks’ thoughts. Feel their pain. The pain of living folks too. Finding a muse is just an artist or holy man’s way of getting a foot in the Void Which Binds’ front door. Aenea knew that. You should have too. Dan Simmons

I could not do this, I realized, if I were immortal. This degree of love of life and of one another is granted, I saw for once and for ever, not to immortals, but to those who live briefly and always under the shadow of death and loss. Dan Simmons

If I should die, " said I to myself, "I have left no immortal work behind me - nothing to make my friends proud of my memory - but I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember'd. Dan Simmons

... a comment with the idle arrogance common of such nobodies who have just come into a small bit of power. Dan Simmons

The whole planet reeks of mysticism without revelation. Dan Simmons

So many important things pass quickly without being understood at the time. So many powerful moments are buried beneath the absurd Dan Simmons

I loved you backward and forward in time. I loved you beyond boundaries of time and space. Dan Simmons

At that moment I would have welcomed spider-rats nibbling on my toes about as much as the idea of chatting with a missionary priest. Dan Simmons

For seven centuries the existence of Grand Unification Theories and hyperstring post-quantum physics and Core-given understanding of the universe as self-contained and boundless, without Big Bang singularities or corresponding endpoints, had pretty much eliminated any role of God–primitively anthropomorphic or sophisticatedly post- Einsteinian–even as a caretaker or pre- Creation former of rules. The modern universe, as machine and man had come to understand it, needed no Creator; in fact, allowed no Creator. Its rules allowed very little tinkering and no major revisions. It had not begun and would not end, beyond cycles of expansion and contraction as regular and self-regulated as the seasons on Old Earth. Dan Simmons

The Hegemony had known how to treat cancer, but most of the gene-tailoring knowledge and technology had been lost after the Fall. Dan Simmons

The Great Change is when humankind accepts its role as part of the natural order of the universe instead of its role as a cancer Dan Simmons

My intellect was my greatest vanity. Dan Simmons

I loved almost everything about being a teacher, but I was an unusual teacher. Dan Simmons

Writing, I'm convinced, should be a subversive activity - frowned on by the authorities - and not one cooed over and praised beyond common sense by some teacher. Dan Simmons