Dan Simmons > Quotes

“Who are you, Hockenberry, to thwart Fate and defy the Will of the Gods?

I am me, Thomas Hockenberry. I am fed up with these power-addled thugs who call themselves gods.”
― Dan Simmons

“… that consciousness can evolve to a plane more benevolent than its counterpoint of a universe hardwired to indifference.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“He was a smart man whose mind was stupid with the chemical by-products of constant fatigue.”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“… il nostro futuro sarà nelle buie distanze fra le stelle, oltre che nei mondi illuminati dal sole.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“Siri, am I doing the right thing?”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“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, The Fall of Hyperion

“It was as if they had climbed the last hill in creation.”
― Dan Simmons

“<>, habría dicho Quirón”
― Dan Simmons, Olympos: L'Attacco dei Voynix

“carious”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“How I yearn to throw myself into endless space," said Maggie, "and float above the awful abyss.”
― Dan Simmons, Phases of Gravity

“In such seconds of decision entire futures are made”
― Dan Simmons

“medicine hadn’t really changed much since the days of leeches and poultices; nowadays they whirred one in centrifuges, realigned the body’s magnetic field, bombarded the victim with sonic waves, tapped into the cells to interrogate the RNA, and then admitted their ignorance without actually coming out and saying so. The only thing that had changed was that the bills were bigger.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“turgid”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“The dying light above rippled on the thing’s carapace, cascaded down across curving breastplate to steel thorns there, shimmering on finger-blades and scalpels rising from every joint. Sol hugged Rachel to his chest and stared into the multifaceted red furnaces that passed for the Shrike’s eyes. The sunset faded into the blood-red glow of Sol’s recurrent dream. The Shrike’s head turned slightly, swiveling without friction, rotating ninety degrees right, ninety degrees left, as if the creature were surveying its domain. The Shrike took three steps forward, stopping less than two meters from Sol. The thing’s four arms twisted and rose, fingerblades uncurling.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“she released the world for the land of infant sleep.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“Belay that!” cries the first mate. “No fucking profanity. Speak when you’re fucking spoken to, Crispe.”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“If there is a god [...] he's a poet. And a failed one at that.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion #2

“Marvelous melodrama,” laughed Silenus. “A real-life, Christ-weeping Sargasso of Souls and we’re for it. Who orchestrates this shitpot of a plot, anyway?”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“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, The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle: Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, The Rise of Endymion

“There was just a speck in the center of this T-shirt. But the speck grew larger—became a shirtless man walking toward the viewer—and pretty soon you could see the rapidly approaching man’s face. Vladimir Putin.”
― Dan Simmons

“The best lack all conviction,” he thought, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Dur”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“Red and blue shadows stretched across the amber lawn toward us. “Keats,” I said.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“Dust and powdered plaster hung in the air like incense, outlining two shafts of sunlight streaming down from narrow windows high above.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“you can judge a man by his choice of enemies as well as or better than by his choice of friends,”
― Dan Simmons, Phases of Gravity

“vagaries”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“Colonel Kassad returns to the fire and slides the night visor up onto the top of his helmet. Kassad is wearing full combat gear, and the activated chameleon polymer shows only his face, floating two meters above the ground. “Nothing,” he says. “No movement. No heat traces. No sound besides the wind.” Kassad leans the FORCE multipurpose assault rifle against a rock and sits near the others, the fibers of his impact armor deactivating into a matte black not much more visible than before.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“placid”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“As G. K. Chesteron once wrote: “You can free things from alien or accidental laws of their own nature…. Do not go about…encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end.”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“In an age of superchargers, turbochargers, and every other prosthetic breathing aid, this was a normally aspirated V-6 that derived speed from perfection.”
― Dan Simmons, Darwin's Blade

“that 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, The Rise of Endymion