Dan Simmons > Quotes

“when I find the bullet iwill spit it out it out.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“He guards his privacy as zealously as a dragon guards his gold.”
― Dan Simmons

“I don’t know,” says Hunt. “That doesn’t sound like something a poet whose reputation has lasted a thousand years would have written.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“Sarai gripped his hand. “Do you think you’re the only one who has had the dream?” “Dream?” managed Sol. She”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“How far are you going?” I asked. “North,” said the boy with a shrug. It constantly amazes me that we have somehow contrived to raise an entire generation which cannot answer a simple question.”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“For all of our talk of expansion and
pioneering spirit these past five centuries, we all know how stultified and static our human universe has become. We are in a comfortable Dark Ages of the inventive mind; institutions change but little, and that by gradual evolution rather than revolution; scientific research creeps crablike in a lateral shuffle, where once it leaped in great intuitive bounds; devices change even less, plateau technologies common to us would be instantly identifiable – and operable – to our great-grandfathers.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“On Sunday morning, before a live in-person audience of eight thousand and a live television audience of perhaps two and a half million, the Reverend Jimmy Wayne Sutter preached a fire and brimstone sermon so bone-rattling that members of the audience in the Palace of Worship were on their feet and speaking in tongues while those at home were on their phones and giving their Visa and Master Charge numbers to waiting pledge takers. The televised worship service lasted ninety minutes and seventy-two minutes of it consisted of the Reverend Sutter’s sermon. Jimmy Wayne read excerpts from the Letters to the Corinthians to the faithful, and then followed that with a much longer segment where he imagined Paul writing updated letters to the Corinthians in which he reported on the moral tone and prospects in the United States. To hear the Reverend Jimmy Wayne put words in Paul’s mouth, the current climate in the U.S. was one of prayerlessness, pornography, creeping secular humanism inculcating defenseless youth in the secret rites of sinful socialism, permissiveness, promiscuity, demonic possession advanced by rock videos and by Dungeons and Dragons games, and a general and pervasive rottenness manifested most visibly by the sinfuls’ refusal to accept Christ as their personal Savior while giving generously to such urgent Christian causes as Bible Outreach, 1-800-555-6444.”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“Natalie, this entire century has been a miserable melodrama written by third-rate minds at the expense of other people’s souls and lives.”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“We are all human beings,’ he used to say, ‘despite temporary differences which divide us.’ I am sure that my father went to his death believing this.”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“Saul took a deep breath. He had lectured at Columbia and other universities on the peculiar and perverse strain of modern violence in such books and movies as The Exorcist, The Omen, and innumerable imitations, going back to Rosemary’s Baby. Saul had seen the rash of demonic-children entertainments as a symptom of deeper underlying fears and hatreds; the “me-generation’s” inability to shift into the role of responsible parenthood at the cost of losing their own interminable childhood, the transference of guilt from divorce—the child is not really a child, but an older, evil thing, capable of deserving any abuse resulting from the adult’s selfish actions—and the anger of an entire society revolting after two decades of a culture dominated by and devoted to youthful looks, youth-oriented music, juvenile movies, and the television and movie myth of the adult-child inevitably wiser, calmer, and more “with-it” than the childish adults in the house hold. So Saul had lectured that the child-fear and child-hatred becoming visible in popular shows and books had its irrational roots in common guilts, shared anxieties, and the universal angst of the age. He had warned that the national wave of abuse, neglect, and callousness toward children had its historical antecedents and that it would run its course, but that everything possible must be done to avoid and eliminate that brand of violence before it poisoned America.”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“Students of animal behavior look at pecking order, group dominance, and call the top ram or sparrow or wolf or whatever the alpha male. Didn’t want to be sexist so I think of it in terms of personality. Sometimes I think discrimination and other stupid social roadblocks breed an inordinate number of alpha personalities. Maybe it’s a sort of natural selection process by which ethnic and cultural groups affirm their fair places in unfair societies.”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“a farcaster essentially is just a crude hole ripped in space/time by a phased singularity.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“photographs of the establishment’s “special platters.” I assumed the photographs were provided for illiterate clientele who could not decode the inflated prose touting “delectable, crispy-brown home fries” and “those all-time Southern favorites, delicious hominy and grits just like Grandma used to make!!” The menu was dense with asides and breathless exclamations. A sidebar explained what these strange Southern delicacies were and urged the Yankee tourists to be daring. I thought of how strange it was that the tiresome subsistence diet of a people too poor or too ignorant to eat well inevitably becomes the traditional “soul food” of the next generation.”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“There were two colored girls in the group. Vincent paused when the group paused. He sniffed the air, actually picking up the strong, animallike scent of the bucks. It is no longer polite in the South to use that word, but few words apply as well. It is a simple fact that a Negro male is quick to excite and as thoughtless of his surroundings as a stallion or a male dog near a bitch in heat. These two colored girls must have been in heat; Vincent watched as they copulated there on the shadowy embankment, the third boy also watching until his turn came, the girls’ bare, black legs opening and closing against the bobbing haunches of the thrusting males. Vincent’s entire body surged with the need to act then, but I made him look away, wait until the boys were finished with their lust, the girls gone calling and laughing—as guiltless and guileless as sated alley cats—toward their own homes. Then I unleashed Vincent.”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“The world just fades away. All other thoughts just fade away! All that remains are the sights and sounds and characters and world created for us by the author! One might as well be anaesthetised to the mundane world around us. All readers have had that experience.”
― Dan Simmons, Drood

“just in the datasphere or the megasphere … but in the metasphere. Loose in the wider psychocerbernet that even the Core was terrified of.…” “Lions and tigers and bears,” muttered A. Bettik.”
― Dan Simmons, Endymion

“I'm sorry for the inconvenience. Kastrop-Rauxel has no datasphere or sats of any kind. Now please go ahead with what you were saying.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“Eric Hoffer says that to the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint.”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“Without thinking, Aaron went into the wide-legged, two-handed firing stance he had been drilled in. He could hear Eliahu’s voice, and perfectly remember the old instructor’s slow but stern words: “If they are not ready, fire. If they are ready, fire. If they have hostages, fire. If there is more than one target, fire. Two shots each, two. Do not think—fire.”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort