Dan Simmons Quotes

The world often seemed more like a template for fiction than something that should be indulged in for its own sake.

And above it all the butterfly effect. The sure knowledge that the entire life of a human being is like a single day in that human's life: unplannable, unpredictable, governed by the hidden tides of chaotic factors and buffered by butterfly wings ...

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.

THERE WILL BE NO FURTHER MISUSE OF THIS CHANNEL. YOU ARE DISTURBING OTHERS WHO ARE USING IT TO SERIOUS PURPOSE. ACCESS WILL BE RESTORED WHEN YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT IT IS FOR. GOODBYE

Sarai had treasured every stage of Rachel's childhood, enjoying the day-to-day normalcy of things; a normalcy which she quietly accepted as the best of life. She had always felt that the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unself-conscious flow of little things - the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossings and connections casual, dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal.

The world as we know it is ending, my friends, no matter what happens to us

Context is to data what water is to a dolphin

Artists recognize other artists as soon as the pencil begins to move.

After ten standard months I was done, acknowledging the ancient aphorism to the effect that no book or poem is ever finished, merely abandoned.

Martin Silenus sniffed a jar, found a knife on the sandwich plate, and added great dollops of horseradish to his sandwich. His eyes sparkled with tears as he ate.

There was just a speck in the center of this T-shirt. But the speck grew larger - became a shirtless man walking toward the viewer - and pretty soon you could see the rapidly approaching man's face. Vladimir Putin.

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

You stay with her. I'll follow it in.

Haven't you ever harbored the secret thought that somewhere Huck and Jim are - at this instant - poling their raft down some river just beyond our reach, so much more real are they than the shoe clerk who fitted us just a forgotten day ago?

Power: a currency that never went out of style.

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.

There's a unique bond of trust between readers and authors that I don't believe exists in any other art form; as a reader, I trust a novelist to give me his or her best effort, however flawed.

Who was Hitler?' I said.
Tyrena smiled slightly. 'An Old Earth politician who did some writing.

The captain of HMS Terror often thought that he knew nothing about the future - other than that his ship and Erebus would never again steam or sail - but then he reminded himself of one certainty: when his store of whiskey was gone, Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier was going to blow his brains out.

I discovered what a mental stimulant physical labor could be; not mere physical labor, I should add, but absolutely spine-bending, lung-racking, gut-ripping, ligament-tearing, and ball-breaking physical labor. But as long as the task is both onerous and repetitive, I discovered, the mind is not only free to wander to more imaginative climes, it actually flees to higher planes.

I'm hungry, Raul," she said from the head of the stairs. "Want to go down and see what this old ship's galley can whomp up for lunch?

suddenly understood perfectly why Abraham had agreed to sacrifice Isaac, his son, when the Lord commanded him to do so. It was not obedience. It was not even to put the love of God above the love of his son. Abraham was testing God. By denying the sacrifice at the last moment, by stopping the knife, God had earned the right - in Abraham's eyes and the hearts of his offspring - to become the God of Abraham. Sol

It started 25 years ago, when I was teaching elementary school in a small town in Missouri.

Designed from DNA to compute, I said, appalled at the thought of Core machines being given the benefit of the doubt when it came to souls.

In the months since Challenger, Baedecker had found it hard to believe that the country had ever flown so frequently and competently into space. The long hiatus of earthbound doubt in which nothing flew had become the normal state of things to Baedecker, mixing in his own mind with a dreary sense of heaviness, of entropy and gravity triumphant.

... Thou art a dreaming thing; A fever of thyself - think of the Earth; What bliss even in hope is there for thee? What haven? every creature hath its home; Every sole man hath days of joy and pain, Whether his labours be sublime or low - The pain alone; the joy alone; distinct: Only the dreamer venoms all his days, Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve.

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.

Belief in one's identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one's immortality ... and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.

Can God play a significant game with his own creature? Can any creator, even a limited one, play a significant game with his own creature?

Sometimes there is a thin line separating orthodox zeal from apostasy,' said Father Lenar Hoyt

Tell me everything you know about the horse, Bottom-san

as a dozen pinpoints of fierce light expanded into ripples and shock waves of plasma explosions far out in space. "I wish we had the technology to fight God on an equal basis," he said in low, tight tones. "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." Father

I have often been called insane by those who underestimate the power of poetry.

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

Luckily, even as a young man not yet become himself, John Bridgens had two things besides indecision that kept him from self-destruction - books and a sense of irony.

The Church might have died before this revelation could have brought new life to it. But

I nodded, understanding nothing.

War must never be a condition but, rather, a temporary scourge which we suffer as a child does a fever, knowing that health follows the long night of pain and that peace is health.

God Almighty, I love life. Even this vile place, where the trees are shattered stubs and where nothing grows but craters, even the sights, scents, sounds, and stirrings of this place are preferable to the unchanging nothingness of the Great Darkness.

The pack of media brayed and bellowed outside the house for seven weeks. Sol realized then what he had known and forgotten about very small communities: they were frequently annoying, always parochial, sometimes prying on a one-to-one level, but never had they subscribed to the vicious legacy of the so-called "public's right to know".

Failing tastes of bile and dog vomit. Shame on any man who gets used to that taste.

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.

If everyone could understand the working of a psychopath's mind, we undoubtedly would be closer to insanity ourselves.

Life doesn't retreat.

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.

Any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principal which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being evil.

The day is perfect and I hate it for being so.

The words sounded like a mournful incantation.

If our god's work is to be done in our time, we must do it ourselves.

Wasn't 'Ms.' an honorific for females back in pre-rubicon days?" asked Frome. "Some sort of honorary degree for not getting married or something?

If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include the truth of contact or be forever hollow.

Once evolution gets a good basic design, it tends to throw away the variants and concentrate on the near-infinite diversity within that design.

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.

Lovemaking seems all too absurd when described.

Look," said Lamia, "what good would telling each other stories do? When we meet the Shrike, we tell it what we want, one of us is granted the wish, and the others die. Correct?

Hoyt's view of hell is tactile; it is the pain which moves in him like jagged wires pulled through his veins and guts.

Mystery. The strangeness of place so necessary to some creative spirits. A perfect mixture of the classical utopia and the pagan mystery.

[When you meet a swordsman/ meet him with a sword Do not offer a poem to anyone but a poet]

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.

the lightning dance of gigantic hellwhip displays, beams the size of small worlds cutting their swath across light-hours and being contorted by the riptides of defensive singularities: the aurora shimmer of defense fields leaping and dying under the assault of terrible energies only to be reborn nanoseconds later.

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

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

Are we so sure that Christ always knew what to do next? He knew what had to be done. It is not always the same as knowing what to do.

Later, when the battles are won and the world is theirs, I will tell them about her. I will sing to them of Siri.

In the end
when all else is dust
loyalty to those we love is all we can carry with us to the grave. Faith
true faith
was trusting in that love.

It is a mystery, and to tell the truth, I am intrigued by mysteries even if this is to be my last week of enjoying them. I would welcome some glimmer of understanding but, failing that, working on the puzzle will suffice.

My days were but heartbeats to you. I hated you for that.

This is where the Iliad begins, and it should be the focus of all my energies and professional skills, but the truth is that I don't really give a shit.

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.

Aenea heard the music of the spheres. She resonated with the Void Which Binds, which resonates in turn to sentient life and thought, and then she used the almost illimitable energy of the Void to ... to take the first step.

A society devoted to self-destruction and waste but unwilling to acknowledge its indulgent ways.

This is some sort of joke, isn't it?" asks Hunt, staring at the flawless blue sky and distant fields.
I cough as lightly and briefly as possible into a handkerchief I have made from a towel borrowed from the inn. "Probably," I say. "But then, what isn't?

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

It occurs to me that our survival may depend upon our talking to one another.

Sometimes," said General Morpurgo, taking her hand, "dreams are all that separate us from the machines.

God is found in this Life ... to wait for another is folly.

Religion seems to have always offered us that false duality ... the silences of infinite space or the cozy comfort of inner certainty.

They ... are ... so ... sorry, " she whispered. "The machine brings back no ... pictures ... only the food and air and water. It is programmed ... as you suggested, Dem Lia ... to eliminate infestations. They are ... so ... so ... sorry for the loss of Ouster life. They offer the suicide of ... of their species ... if it would atone for the destruction.

In the last few months, perhaps because he has had no one to speak to -- or at least no interlocutor who can respond with actual out-loud speech -- he has learned how to let different parts of his mind and heart speak within him as if they were different souls with their own arguments.

The day before the Queen's Ball, Father had a visitor--a very young girl with literary aspirations, someone Lord Lytton had recommended visit Father and sent over–and while Father was explaining to her the enjoyment he was having in writing this Drood book for serialisation, this upstart of a girl had the temerity to ask, 'But suppose you died before all the book was written?' [...] He spoke very softly in his kindest voice and said to her, 'One can only work on, you know--work while it is day.

It is true that we Russians have sent only four doctors into space in forty years of flight, but still I might have had chance to fly to Mir or International Space Station except for one fact. This is that I cannot urinate - is this the right word, Mr. Roth? - I cannot urinate on wheel of bus.

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

He suspected that Duane had lived in those lofty realms of thought, listening to the voices of men long dead rising from books the way he'd once said he listened to late-night radio shows in his basement.

Commander Lebedev wrote - 'After a communication session we invited Flight Engineer Savitskaya to the heavily laden table. We gave Sveta a blue floral print apron and told her, " 'Look, Sveta, even though you are a pilot and cosmonaut, you are still a woman first. Would you please do us the honor of being our hostess tonight?' "
"Ouch," says Roth

The cruciform does not like pain. Nor do I but, like the cruciform, I am willing to use it to serve my purposes. And I will do so consciously, not instinctively like the mindless mass of alien tissue embedded in me. This thing only seeks a mindless avoidance of death by any means. I do not wish to die, but I welcome pain and death rather than an eternity of mindless life. Life is sacred--I still hold to that as a core element of the Church's though and teachings these past twenty-eight hundred years when life has been so cheap--but even more sacred is the soul.
I realize now that what I was trying to do with the Armaghast data was offer the Church not a rebirth but only a transition to a false life such as these poor walking corpses inhabit. If the Church is meant to die, it must do so--but do so gloriously, in the full knowledge of its rebirth in Christ. It must go into the darkness not willingly but well--bravely and firm of faith--like the millions who have gone before us, keeping faith with all those generations facing death in the isolated silence of death camps and nuclear fireballs and cancer wards and pogroms, going into the darkness, if not hopefully, then prayerful that there is some reason for it all, something worth the price of all that pain, all those sacrifices., 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 the all too shakable conviction of faith. And if the

He wished he were home in Charleston, listening to the Dave Brubeck Quartet on the stereo and reading Bruce Catton.

But Siri knew the slow pace of books and the cadences of theater under the stars. I knew only the stars.

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.

In the end, thought Sol, past logic and hope, it is dreams and the love of those dearest to us that form Abraham's answer to God.

We are all eaters of souls.

Johnny sighed in the darkness. "I don't understand the exact purpose of the Keats Project or the other Old Earth analogs, but I suspect that it is part of a TechnoCore project going back at least seven standard centuries to realize the Ultimate Intelligence."
"The Ultimate Intelligence," I said, exhaling smoke. "Uh-huh. So the TechnoCore is trying to ... what? ... to build God."
"Yes.

The universe deepened at that moment, the music of the spheres grew from a mere chorus to a symphony as triumphant as Beethoven's Ninth, and I knew that I would always be able to hear it when I wished or needed to, always be able to Use it to take the step I needed to see the one I loved, or, failing that, step to the place where I had been with the one I loved, or, failing that, find a place to love for its own beauty and richness.
The energy of quasars and exploding stellar nuclei filled me then. I was borne up on waves of energy more lovely and more lyrical even than the Ouster angels' wings seen sliding along corridors of sunlight. The shell of deadly energy that was my prison and execution cell seemed laughable now, Schrödinger's original joke, a child's jump rope laid around me on the ground as restraining walls.
I stepped out of the Schrödinger cat box and out of Armaghast System.

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.

There is something about raising a child that helps to sharpen one's sense of what is real.

The future is like smoke from a burning forest, waiting for the wind of specific events and personal courage to blow the sparks and embers of reality this way or that.

All violence flows from the same source ... the need for power. Power is the only true morality ... the only deathless god, and the appetite for violence is its only commandment.

Meina Gladstone sat at the head of the long table and felt the peculiar and not-unpleasant sense of separateness which comes from far too little sleep over far too long a period.

The charge took less than forty seconds but Kassad discovered that this was ample time for his mouth to go absolutely dry, his breathing to begin to have problems, and for his testicles to retreat completely into his body. If the rest of Kassad could have found a comparable hiding place, he would have seriously considered crawling into it.

God is the creature, not the creator.

He is asking us if we can truly bear hearing the story. Losing our ignorance can be dangerous because our ignorance is a shield.