Dan Simmons Quotes

#1. 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

#2. What had John Keats said about Negative Capability - holding two opposite ideas in one's mind at the same time without straining to reconcile them?

Dan Simmons

#3. Alone with the Morlocks, thought Silenus. But not even Morlocks for company in the end. Only my muse. There

Dan Simmons

#4. [A less-enlightened personage once asked Ummon What is the God-nature/Buddha/Central Truth> Ummon answered him A dried shit-stick]

Dan Simmons

#5. Data itself ... was tolerable. It was the constant nerve-web-expanding pain of context that would kill him.

Dan Simmons

#6. Sato said softly, "Bottom-san, please to understand, if you call me 'motherfucker' again, I shall be forced to kill you.

Dan Simmons

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

Dan Simmons

#8. ENOUGH!" bellows Zeus and not only stops Ares diatribe , but freezes every god and robot in place. "I'll hear no more whining prattle from you, Ares, you lying, two-faced, treacherous sparrowfart, you miserable excuse for a man, much less for a god.

Dan Simmons

#9. Having sex or a domestic quarrel with the house monitors on is like undressing in front of a dog or cat ... it gives you pause the first time, and then you forget about it.

Dan Simmons

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

Dan Simmons

#11. Androids were free from original sin, therefore spiritually superior to humankind

Dan Simmons

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

Dan Simmons

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

Dan Simmons

#14. God is our refuge and strength, and ever-prethent help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountainth fall into the heart of the sea, though its waterth roar and foam and the mountains quake with their thurging.

Dan Simmons

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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.

Dan Simmons

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

Dan Simmons

#20. Words are the light and sound of our existence, the heat lightning by which the night is illuminated.

Dan Simmons

#21. 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

#22. 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. Sol

Dan Simmons

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. Pain has been with him since birth - the universe's gift to a poet ...

Dan Simmons

#26. Who, like Crozier, would rather have his kidney stones removed with a spoon than be forced to suffer sermons -

Dan Simmons

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

Dan Simmons

#28. Their three approaches fail but somehow the story itself succeeds, despite its narrator's and even author's failures!

Dan Simmons

#29. But I think, and hope, that the novels can be understood and enjoyed as science fiction, on their own terms.

Dan Simmons

#30. It was a dramatization of total chaos, a functional definition of confusion, an unchoreographed dance of sad violence. It was war.

Dan Simmons

#31. Books ... were merely nodes in a near-infinite matrix of information that exists in four dimensions, evolving toward the idea of the concept of the approximation of the shadow of Truth vertically through time as well as longitudinally through knowledge.

Dan Simmons

#32. 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

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

Dan Simmons

#34. sounding now/old songs/deep water/no-Great Voices/no-Shark/old songs/new songs

Dan Simmons

#35. 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

#36. She almost smiled at the justice of it, at her ultimate foolishness in thinking that she could uncage chaos and then control it.

Dan Simmons

#37. You treat violence as an aberration ... when in truth it is the norm. It is the very essence of the human condition.

Dan Simmons

#38. But as with so many things in our lives, the reason for doing something is not the important thing. It is the fact of doing that remains.

Dan Simmons

#39. You are quite acute for a mental stillborn

Dan Simmons

#40. 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

#41. Blood and brain tissue clung to the wet rock like the refuse of a sad picnic.

Dan Simmons

#42. 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

#43. 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

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

Dan Simmons

#45. 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

#46. Accidents are like death. Waiting for us everywhere. Inevitable. Unavoidable. Plan as we might, they defy our planning.

Dan Simmons

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. Aenea nodded. It's wonderful to preserve tradition, but a healthy organism evolves ... culturally and physically.

Dan Simmons

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

Dan Simmons

#51. The words sounded like a mournful incantation.

Dan Simmons

#52. It had long been accepted that if a species put mankind on its food-chain menu the species would be extinct before long.

Dan Simmons

#53. 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?

Dan Simmons

#54. 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

#55. We will revel in hardships and welcome strangeness.

Dan Simmons

#56. 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.

Dan Simmons

#57. In the end, it is all we are, these limpid tide pools of self-consciousness between crashing waves of pain. We are destined and designed to bear our pain with us, hugging it tight to our bellies like the young Spartan thief hiding a wolf cub so it can eat away our insides.

Dan Simmons

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

Dan Simmons

#59. Hell is also the memory of starving children in the slums of Armaghast and the smile of politicians sending boys off to die in colonial wars.

Dan Simmons

#60. 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

#61. I loved you backward and forward in time. I loved you beyond boundaries of time and space.

Dan Simmons

#62. Movie SF is, by definition, dumbed down - there have only been three or four SF movies in the history of film that aspire to the complexity of literary SF.

Dan Simmons

#63. ameliorative. He climbed

Dan Simmons

#64. beyond ideology and ambition, beyond thought and emotion, there was only pain. And salvation from it.

Dan Simmons

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

Dan Simmons

#66. Human art, Mahnmut knew, simply transcended human beings.

Dan Simmons

#67. Love was as hardwired into the structure of the universe as gravity and matter.

Dan Simmons

#68. Evolution brings human beings. Human beings, through a long and painful process, bring humanity.

Dan Simmons

#69. Sol had not known he was lonely until he met Sarai.

Dan Simmons

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. People always pay a lot of money for things that make them stupid.

Dan Simmons

#73. Poetry is only secondarily about words. Primarily, it is about truth.

Dan Simmons

#74. Thus evolved some members of the Core - not altruists, but desperate survivalists who realized that the only way ultimately to win their never-ending zero-sum game was to stop the game. And to stop the game they needed to evolve into a species capable of empathy.

Dan Simmons

#75. 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

#76. All this natural misery," Dr. Goodsir said suddenly. "Why do you men have to add to it? Why does our species always have to take our full measure of God-given misery and terror and mortality and then make it worse? Can you answer me that, Mr. Hickey?

Dan Simmons

#77. A degree in psychiatry merely qualifies one to begin learning about the intricacies and foibles of the human personality.

Dan Simmons

#78. I am merely a poet dying far from home.

Dan Simmons

#79. 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.

Dan Simmons

#80. Speaking as a novelist myself, I know that members of our profession live in our imaginations as much or more as we inhabit what people call 'the real world' ...

Dan Simmons

#81. 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

Dan Simmons

#82. And my editor, Tom Dupree, for his patience, enthusiasm, and shared good taste for loving Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Dan Simmons

#83. thighs flesh rather than steel, her groin matted from the moisture of their passion. Her face is dark, the sun behind her, but he sees red flames dying in the multifaceted pits of her eyes. She smiles and he sees sunlight glint on rows of metal

Dan Simmons

#84. 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

#85. All good things beyond sleep come precisely because we defy gravity while we live.

Dan Simmons

#86. You have to live to really know things, my love

Dan Simmons

#87. No one inspired me to write, but writer Harlan Ellison terrified me into getting published.

Dan Simmons

#88. apocalyptic statuary of the post-Hegira expansionist period. I

Dan Simmons

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

Dan Simmons

#90. 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

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

Dan Simmons

#92. 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

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

Dan Simmons

#94. 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

#95. His imagination was always more real than the reality of daily life.

Dan Simmons

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

Dan Simmons

#97. For our race to achieve the true satori, for us to move to that next level of consciousness and evolution that so many of our philosophies proclaim, all facets of human endeavor must become conscious strivings for art.

Dan Simmons

#98. 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

#99. I realized at that instant just how surely the affirmation of demons or the summoning of Satan somehow can affirm the reality of their mystic antithesis - the God of Abraham.

Dan Simmons

#100. 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