Dan Simmons quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Dan Simmons

Dan Simmons Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Dan Simmons on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

The sum of the crowd's IQ was far below that of its most modest single member. Mobs have passions, not brains.

You'll have to ask him in the next life," said Sol tiredly. "He's dead.

Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers.

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.

As for the depiction of the Catholic church, it's not meant to be a prediction.

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

In such seconds of decision entire futures are made.

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?

The young remember most deeply ... When we are old and failing, it is the memories of childhood which can be summoned most clearly.

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

Like your kind/
we usually destroy
what we cannot understand

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

Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.

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

Nothing had ever been so welcome by its absence.

I doubt if he ever confronted and acknowledged his own deeper motivations, except when they were as pure as spring water.

Human philosophy tends to shake down into values which might be categorized as intellectual, religious, moral, and aesthetic.

Well, nothing helps an artist's career more than a little death and obscurity, I always say.

We all retreat into ourselves in some way.

apocalyptic statuary of the post-Hegira expansionist period. I

Nobody gets beyond a petroleum economy. Not while there's petroleum there.

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

Stupidity has a price and it always gets paid.

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

This is every writer's nightmare
the sudden breakdown of meaning in the language that sustains and supports us ...

Words were like objects, making the idea more solid
less a poisonous gas and more a ... cube of crystallized thought.

Meaning no disrespect, sir, but there's no way in the Good Lord's fucking universe that anyone can bar accidents or the unexpected.

Time sure kicks the shit out of people...

The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. I

Life and work revolved around duty, self-respect, and the ultimate value of one's word.

Odd how many suffering members of humankind have faced eternity obsessed with their bowels, their bedsores, or the meagerness of their diets.

In the beginning was the Word.
In the end ... past honor, past life, past caring ...
In the end will be the Word.

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

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.

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

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

My intellect was my greatest vanity.

Philosophical poetry by moonlight was all right, but guns that shot straight and true were a necessity.

At that point Lord Agamemnon, Atreus' son, began shitting whole goats, laughs Orus, speaking loudly enough that several captains turn to frown at us.

The whole planet reeks of mysticism without revelation.

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

Yes. But terrible heresies have proven to be grim truths many times before in the longer history of my Church, Sek Hardeen.

If there is a God, I thought, it's a painkiller.

Womangrove root and firefern lined the banks, and each branch and twisting

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

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.

The love of violence is an aspect of our humanity. Even the weak wish to be strong primarily so they can wield the whip.

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

If one is to steal, steal from the forgotten masters. The

Anything which deceives is evil, I believe.

Context is to data what water is to a dolphin

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

God is the creature, not the creator.

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?

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

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

We are not the only avatars of humanity. Once our computing machines achieved self-consciousness, they became part of this design.

I did not forget that there was a panic button. The problem is simple - when there is real panic, one does not immediately think of buttons. The

[H]istory viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.

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

Human art, Mahnmut knew, simply transcended human beings.

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

Entropy is a bitch,

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

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

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

People scream and run for coyer.

In an interstellar society where the Church ruled all but absolutely, news awaited not only independent confirmation but official permission to exist.

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

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.

- Was I a swordsman then? sends Johnny. Or a poet? [Yes There is never one without the other]

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.

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

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.

Odd how the daily imperatives persist even in the face of collective disaster.

No one wants to pay for a look at another person's angst.

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

The young remember most deeply

To be a true poet is to become God.

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

Quality wine, Scotch, and coffee had been the three irreplaceable commodities after the death of Old Earth.

We will revel in hardships and welcome strangeness.

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

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.

I know the fucking Bible, and there ain't no fucking Book of Leviathan.

She returned, trailing clouds of glory which quickly dissipated in the mundane flow of sensory trivia.

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

He was, in other words, a careful man with careless impulses.

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

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

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

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

But it's not just a game of finding literary references.

Life doesn't retreat.

Among us we represent islands of time as well as separate oceans of perspective.

Doing a life study while drunk and in the process of being seduced is never a formula for quality art.

The shortest route to courage is absolute ignorance.

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

Fate and victory shift ... now this way, now that way
like a line of unarmored men under a hail of enemy arrows.