Dan Simmons > Quotes

“Barbarians, we call them, while all the while we timidly cling to our Web like Visigoths crouching in the ruins of Rome's faded glory and proclaim ourselves civilized.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“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, Hyperion

“When the last autumn of Dickens's life was over, he continued to work through his final winter and into spring. This is how all of us writers give away the days and years and decades of our lives in exchange for stacks of paper with scratches and squiggles on them. And when Death calls, how many of us would trade all those pages, all that squandered lifetime-worth of painfully achieved scratches and squiggles, for just one more day, one more fully lived and experienced day? And what price would we writers pay for that one extra day spent with those we ignored while we were locked away scratching and squiggling in our arrogant years of solipsistic isolation?

Would we trade all those pages for a single hour? Or all of our books for one real minute?”
― Dan Simmons, Drood

“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, The Fall of Hyperion

“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, The Fall of Hyperion

“We are created for precisely this sort of suffering. 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. What other creature in God's wide domain would carry the memory of you, Fanny, dust these nine hundred years, and allow it to eat away at him even as consumption does the same work with its effortless efficiency?

Words assail me. The thought of books makes me ache. Poetry echoes in my mind, and if I had the ability to banish it, I would do so at once.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“Nobody gets beyond a petroleum economy. Not while there's petroleum there.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“Francis Crozier believes in nothing. Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. It has no plan, no point, no hidden mysteries that make up for the oh-so-obvious miseries and banalities. Nothing he has learned in the past six months has persuaded him otherwise.

Has it?”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“The day is perfect and I hate it for being so.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“Mark Twain once opined in his homey way: “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

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

“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.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“I wish we had the technology to fight God on an equal basis. 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.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“This is every writer's nightmare--the sudden breakdown of meaning in the language that sustains and supports us...”
― Dan Simmons, Drood

“The whole planet reeks of mysticism without revelation.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“Pain is an interesting and off-putting thing. Few if any things in life concentrate our attention so completely and terribly, and few things are more boring to listen to or read about.”
― Dan Simmons, The Rise of Endymion

“God is the creature, not the creator.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“Men who read a lot have a more sensitive disposition, added Fowler. [...]

I did not know what to say to this.

Maybe reading is a sort of curse is all I mean, concluded Fowler. Maybe it's better for a man to stay inside his own mind.

Amen, I felt like saying, although I do not know why.”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“Sol Weintraub 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”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

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

“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, The Fall of Hyperion

“... a society devoted to self-destruction and waste but unwilling to acknowledge its indulgent ways.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“Do you think it's ready?" I [Silenus, The Poet] asked.
"It's perfect... a masterpiece."
"Do you think it'll sell?" I asked.
"No fucking way.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“Human art, Mahnmut knew, simply transcended human beings.”
― Dan Simmons, Ilium

“... all good things beyond sleep come precisely because we defy gravity while we live.”
― Dan Simmons, A Winter Haunting

“Context is to data what water is to a dolphin”
― Dan Simmons, Olympos

“What, after all, is more real to us than the geography of our childhoods?”
― Dan Simmons, A Winter Haunting

“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, Hyperion

“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, Endymion

“The sunset was that long, achingly beautiful balance of stillness in which the sun seemed to hover like a red balloon above the western horizon, the entire sky catching fire from the death of day; a sunset unique to the American Midwest and ignored by most of its inhabitants. The twilight brought the promise of coolness and the certain threat of night.”
― Dan Simmons, Summer of Night