Dan Simmons > Quotes

“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

“He loved the darkness and the mystery of the Catholic service--the tall priest strutting like a carrion crow and pronouncing magic in a dead language, the immediate magic of the Eucharist bringing the dead back to life so that the faithful could devour Him and become of Him, the smell of incense and the mystical chanting.”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“The words sounded like a mournful incantation.”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“Sol had not known he was lonely until he met Sarai.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“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, Song of Kali

“Choose again.”
― Dan Simmons, The Rise of Endymion

“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, The Fall of Hyperion

“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, Hyperion

“The universe is indifferent to our fates. This was the crushing burden that the character took with him as he struggled through the surf toward survival or extinction. The universe just does not give a shit.”
― Dan Simmons, Endymion

“His imagination was always more real than the reality of daily life.”
― Dan Simmons, Drood

“He enjoyed the soft sound of night wind and the knowledge that he was the only boy — perhaps the only human being — out there in the dark on the windy, frozen-grass meadows on this night that smelled of coming snow, alienated from the lighted windows and the warm hearths, very aware that he was of the village but not part of it at that moment. It was a thrilling, almost erotic feeling — an illicit discovery of self separated from everyone and everything else in the cold and dark”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“Why does our species always have to take our full measure of God-given misery and terror and mortality and then make it worse?”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

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

“Goddamn fatherfucking asshole politician moral paraplegic dipshit drag-queen bitch!”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“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, Song of Kali

“Religion and ethics were not always - or even frequently - mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often deflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“It has been my experience that immediately after certain traumatic separations—leaving one’s family to go to war, for instance, or upon the death of a family member, or after parting from one’s beloved with no assurances of reunion—there is a strange calmness, almost a sense of relief, as if the worst has happened and nothing else need be dreaded.”
― Dan Simmons, The Rise of Endymion

“Quality wine, Scotch, and coffee had been the three irreplaceable commodities after the death of Old Earth.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“I will not try to describe the beauty of life in a Swarm ‒ their zero-gravity globe cities and comet farms and thrust clusters, their micro-orbital forests and migrating rivers and the ten thousand colors and textures of life at Rendezvous Week. Suffice it to say that I believe the Ousters have done what Web humanity has not in the past millennia: evolved.
While we live in our derivative cultures, pale reflections of Old Earth life, the Ousters have explored new dimensions of aesthetics and ethics and biosciences and art and all the things that must change and grow to reflect the human soul.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“at that moment, the sum of the crowd’s IQ was far below that of its most modest single member. Mobs have passions, not brains.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“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.”
― Dan Simmons, Prayers to Broken Stones

“Stand as I did after throwing the switch, a murderer, a betrayer, but still proud, feet firmly planted on Hyperion’s shifting sand, head held high, fist raised against the sky, crying “A plague on both your houses!”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“I discovered what a mental stimulant physical labor could be; not mere physical labor, I should add, but absolutely spine-bending, lung-racking, gut-ripping, ligament-tearing, and ball-breaking physical labor. But as long as the task is both onerous and repetitive, I discovered, the mind is not only free to wander to more imaginative climes, it actually flees to higher planes.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“Odd how the daily imperatives persist even in the face of collective disaster.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“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, The Hollow Man

“... pain has been with him since birth - the universe's gift to a poet ...”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“When you've spent thirty years entering rooms filled with strangers you feel less pressure than when you've had only half that number of years of experience. You know what the room and the people in it probably hold for you and you go looking for it. If it's not there, you sense it earlier and leave to go about your business. You just know more about what is, what isn't, and how little time there is to learn the difference.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“People always pay a lot of money for things that make them stupid.”
― Dan Simmons, Summer of Night

“We thought we were special, opening our perceptions, honing our empathy, spilling that cauldron of shared pain onto the dance floor of language and then trying to make a minuet out of all that chaotic hurt. It doesn’t matter a damn bit. We’re no avatars, no sons of god or man. We’re only us, scribbling our conceits alone, reading alone, and dying alone.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“This is some sort of joke, isn't it?" asks Hunt, staring at the flawless blue sky and distant fields.

I cough as lightly and briefly as possible into a handkerchief I have made from a towel borrowed from the inn. "Probably," I say. "But then, what isn't?”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion