Dan Simmons Quotes

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

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 It did not matter to Sol that the command had been rescinded at the last moment.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

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

... 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

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