Top 100 Dan Simmons Quotes
#1. Tell me everything you know about the horse, Bottom-san
Dan Simmons
#2. To be a true poet is to become God.
I tried to explain this to my friends on Heaven's Gate. 'Piss, shit,' I said. 'Asshole motherfucker, goddamn shit goddamn. Cunt. Pee-pee cunt. Goddamn!'
They shook their heads and smiled, and walked away. Great poets are rarely understood in their own day.
Dan Simmons
#3. Poetry is only secondarily about words. Primarily, it is about truth.
Dan Simmons
#4. 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.
Dan Simmons
#5. The fabric of space/time is much like one of the elaborate Vatican tapestries, thinks Nemes, and she who begins pulling on loose threads does so at the peril of watching the whole tapestry ravel.
Dan Simmons
#6. Love was as hardwired into the structure of the universe as gravity and matter.
Dan Simmons
#8. Forcing school children to recite a national pledge doesn't sound very American to me," said James. "No," agreed Holmes. "It sounds German. Very German.
Dan Simmons
#9. beyond ideology and ambition, beyond thought and emotion, there was only pain. And salvation from it.
Dan Simmons
#10. 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
#11. Asshole cunt peepee fuck." "Ah," grinned Old Sludge, showing his one tooth, "going to the company store to get some algae chewies, huh?" "Goddamn poopoo," I would grin back at him.
Dan Simmons
#12. That's all! Now either leave us alone or join us as a father rather than a receiver of sacrifices. You have the choice of Abraham!
Dan Simmons
#13. 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
#14. All good things beyond sleep come precisely because we defy gravity while we live.
Dan Simmons
#15. And my editor, Tom Dupree, for his patience, enthusiasm, and shared good taste for loving Mystery Science Theater 3000.
Dan Simmons
#16. A degree in psychiatry merely qualifies one to begin learning about the intricacies and foibles of the human personality.
Dan Simmons
#17. The critic had added a personal note: Most of us, I hope, have had some child or spouse or friend like Beatrice, someone who by his very nature, his seemingly innate goodness and intelligence, makes us uncomfortably conscious of our lies when we lie.
Dan Simmons
#18. There is no doubt that I have discovered the ultimate in stagnant human societies. The Bikura have realized the human dream of immortality and have paid for it with their humanity and their immortal souls.
Dan Simmons
#19. 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.
Dan Simmons
#20. There is a war up there where time creaks which spans galaxies and eons back and forward to the Big Bang and the Final Implosion
Dan Simmons
#21. him to shoot anyone who even looked cross-eyed at him. "Web English is such a subtle tongue," he said. "That phrase is older than the Web," I said. "Just do it.
Dan Simmons
#22. I have often been called insane by those who underestimate the power of poetry.
Dan Simmons
#23. Androids were free from original sin, therefore spiritually superior to humankind
Dan Simmons
#24. Data itself ... was tolerable. It was the constant nerve-web-expanding pain of context that would kill him.
Dan Simmons
#25. 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
#26. Theoretically, I knew, Sholokov's design for the hawking mat allowed it to fly vertically, the incipient containment field keeping the passenger - theoretically, his beloved niece - from tumbling off backward.
Dan Simmons
#27. Accidents are like death. Waiting for us everywhere. Inevitable. Unavoidable. Plan as we might, they defy our planning.
Dan Simmons
#28. 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.
Dan Simmons
#29. A hero. You want to be one of those rare human beings who make history, rather than merely watch it flow around them like water around a rock.
Dan Simmons
#30. The Consul gripped the edges of the mat with fingers gone white. He had tied the strap of his duffel bag around his belt, otherwise the bag would have tumbled off to a glacier far below.
Dan Simmons
#31. Blood and brain tissue clung to the wet rock like the refuse of a sad picnic.
Dan Simmons
#32. 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.
Dan Simmons
#33. 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?
Dan Simmons
#34. Merely to live without a pain Is little gladness, little gain, Ah, welcome joy tho' mixt with grief
The thorn-set flower that crowns the leaf.
Dan Simmons
#35. Reading had always been another world for him. Not an escape, since he rarely sought escape ... writers had to confront the world if they were going to observe it accurately ... but another world nonetheless. One filled with powerful voices relaying even more powerful thoughts.
Dan Simmons
#36. To John Keats Whose Name Was Writ in Eternity
Dan Simmons
#37. Quality wine, Scotch, and coffee had been the three irreplaceable commodities after the death of Old Earth.
Dan Simmons
#38. The Ice Master was too injured and too exhausted to crawl any farther. Let whatever was going to happen to him happen now and may a Sailor's God fuck to Hell this fucking thing that was going to eat him.
Dan Simmons
#39. Hoyt's view of hell is tactile; it is the pain which moves in him like jagged wires pulled through his veins and guts.
Dan Simmons
#40. 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.
Dan Simmons
#42. The world often seemed more like a template for fiction than something that should be indulged in for its own sake.
Dan Simmons
#43. If one is to steal, steal from the forgotten masters. The
Dan Simmons
#44. A comment with the idle arrogance common of such nobodies who have just come into a small bit of power.
Dan Simmons
#45. 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
#46. It no longer matters who consider themselves the masters of events. Events no longer obey their masters.
Dan Simmons
#47. A society devoted to self-destruction and waste but unwilling to acknowledge its indulgent ways.
Dan Simmons
#48. Be assured, I do not suffer from a sense of humor.
Dan Simmons
#49. Each heart has its graveyard, each household its dead, And knells ring around us wherever we tread, And the feet that awhile made our pathway so bright Pass on to a land that is out of our sight.
Dan Simmons
#50. The strongest beings are those who sing themselves into existence.
Dan Simmons
#51. We are not the only avatars of humanity. Once our computing machines achieved self-consciousness, they became part of this design.
Dan Simmons
#52. There is a fullness and calmness there which can come only from knowing pain.
Dan Simmons
#53. Sometimes," said General Morpurgo, taking her hand, "dreams are all that separate us from the machines.
Dan Simmons
#54. Words were like objects, making the idea more solid
less a poisonous gas and more a ... cube of crystallized thought.
Dan Simmons
#55. Goddamn fatherfucking asshole politician moral paraplegic dipshit drag-queen bitch!
Dan Simmons
#56. Religion seems to have always offered us that false duality ... the silences of infinite space or the cozy comfort of inner certainty.
Dan Simmons
#57. We all retreat into ourselves in some way.
Dan Simmons
#58. The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. I
Dan Simmons
#59. 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.
Dan Simmons
#60. 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 ...
Dan Simmons
#61. 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
#62. 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.
Dan Simmons
#63. I know the fucking Bible, and there ain't no fucking Book of Leviathan.
Dan Simmons
#64. At sunrise of the third day, I saw the corpse's chest begin to rise and fall and I heard the first intake of breath - a rasp like water being poured into a leather pouch.
Dan Simmons
#65. Lovemaking seems all too absurd when described.
Dan Simmons
#66. Womangrove root and firefern lined the banks, and each branch and twisting
Dan Simmons
#67. 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.
Dan Simmons
#68. Suddenly a scream froze her in her tracks. It
Dan Simmons
#69. No one wants to pay for a look at another person's angst.
Dan Simmons
#70. Odd how many suffering members of humankind have faced eternity obsessed with their bowels, their bedsores, or the meagerness of their diets.
Dan Simmons
#71. For those who do not write and who never have been stirred by the creative urge, talk of muses seems a figure of speech, a quaint conceit, but for those of us who live by the Word, our muses are as real and necessary as the soft clay of language which they help to sculpt.
Dan Simmons
#72. He was, in other words, a careful man with careless impulses.
Dan Simmons
#73. 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.
Dan Simmons
#74. 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.
Dan Simmons
#75. HERE LIES ONE WHOSE NAME WAS WRIT IN WATER
Dan Simmons
#76. Who was Hitler?' I said.
Tyrena smiled slightly. 'An Old Earth politician who did some writing.
Dan Simmons
#78. The Song of Kali is with us. It has been with us for a very long time. Its chorus grows and grows and grows. But there are other voices to be heard. There are other songs to be sung.
Dan Simmons
#79. Children bring chaos and clutter and an infinite potential for the future
Dan Simmons
#80. The only true voyage, the only Fountain of Youth," recited Orphu, "would be found not in traveling to strange lands but in having different eyes, in seeing the universe with the eyes of another person, of a hundred others, and seeing the hundred universes each of them sees, which each of them is.
Dan Simmons
#81. Was being greeted by a silent, smiling band of bald, retarded children.
Dan Simmons
#82. 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 -
Dan Simmons
#83. Henry James hated epilogues and refused to use them in his fiction. He said that life granted us no "epilogues", so why should art or literature?
Dan Simmons
#84. They lay together in a sheltered place among the ruins of Brasilia while deathbeams from Chinese EMVs played like blue searchlights on broken ceramic walls.
Dan Simmons
#85. 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.
Dan Simmons
#86. Odd how the daily imperatives persist even in the face of collective disaster.
Dan Simmons
#87. It's one of the strangest attributes of this profession that when we writers get exhausted writing one thing, we relax by writing another.
Dan Simmons
#88. Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.
Dan Simmons
#89. Power: a currency that never went out of style.
Dan Simmons
#90. Sometimes there is no hope," whispered Das.
"There's always some hope, Mr. Das."
"No, Mr. Luczak, there is not. Sometimes there is only pain. And acquiescence to pain. And, perhaps, defiance at the world which demands such pain."
"Defiance is a form of hope, is it not, sir?
Dan Simmons
#92. It was fucking wonderful. It was fucking hell.
Dan Simmons
#94. Fate and victory shift ... now this way, now that way
like a line of unarmored men under a hail of enemy arrows.
Dan Simmons
#95. 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.
Dan Simmons
#96. The love of violence is an aspect of our humanity. Even the weak wish to be strong primarily so they can wield the whip.
Dan Simmons
#97. Later, dictating the tale into his comlog, the Consul remembered it as a seamless whole, minus the pauses, hoarse voice, false starts, and small redundancies which were the timeless failings of human speech
Dan Simmons
#98. What, after all, is more real to us than the geography of our childhoods?
Dan Simmons
#99. In such seconds of decision entire futures are made.
Dan Simmons
#100. We were gods then. But even gods must descend from their high thrones upon occasion.
Dan Simmons
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