Dan Simmons > Quotes

“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

“Be assured, I do not suffer from a sense of humor.”
― Dan Simmons, Endymion

“THERE WILL BE NO FURTHER MISUSE OF THIS CHANNEL. YOU ARE DISTURBING OTHERS WHO ARE USING IT TO SERIOUS PURPOSE. ACCESS WILL BE RESTORED WHEN YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT IT IS FOR. GOODBYE”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“The Ice Master was too injured and too exhausted to crawl any farther. Let whatever was going to happen to him happen now and may a Sailor's God fuck to Hell this fucking thing that was going to eat him.”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“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, Hyperion

“Pain is the curl and foam of a wave that does not break.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“You want to be a hero,” he repeated. “You want to be one of those rare human beings who make history, rather than merely watch it flow around them like water around a rock.”
― Dan Simmons, Endymion

“The essence of honor lay in the moment of combat between equals.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“Eagles are extinct," grumbled Morpurgo. "Perhaps they should have attacked the sky. It betrayed them.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“I remember that day in early May after Le Vesconte's and Private Pilkington's brief joint burial service, one of the men suggested that we name the small spur of land where they were buried "Le Vesconte Point," but Captain Crozier vetoed that idea, saying that if we named every place where one of us might end up buried after the dead person there, we'd run out of land before we ran out of names.”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“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

“There is something about raising a child that helps to sharpen one's sense of what is real.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”
― Dan Simmons, Endymion

“No lifetime is long enough for those who wish to create, Raul. Or for those who simply wish to understand themselves and their lives. It is, perhaps, the curse of being human, but also a blessing.”
― Dan Simmons, The Rise of Endymion

“... a comment with the idle arrogance common of such nobodies who have just come into a small bit of power.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“My intellect was my greatest vanity.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“The cruciform does not like pain. Nor do I but, like the cruciform, I am willing to use it to serve my purposes. And I will do so consciously, not instinctively like the mindless mass of alien tissue embedded in me. This thing only seeks a mindless avoidance of death by any means. I do not wish to die, but I welcome pain and death rather than an eternity of mindless life. Life is sacred--I still hold to that as a core element of the Church's though and teachings these past twenty-eight hundred years when life has been so cheap--but even more sacred is the soul.
I realize now that what I was trying to do with the Armaghast data was offer the Church not a rebirth but only a transition to a false life such as these poor walking corpses inhabit. If the Church is meant to die, it must do so--but do so gloriously, in the full knowledge of its rebirth in Christ. It must go into the darkness not willingly but well--bravely and firm of faith--like the millions who have gone before us, keeping faith with all those generations facing death in the isolated silence of death camps and nuclear fireballs and cancer wards and pogroms, going into the darkness, if not hopefully, then prayerful that there is some reason for it all, something worth the price of all that pain, all those sacrifices., All those before us have gone into the darkness without assurance of logic or fact or persuasive theory, with only a slender thread of hope or the all too shakable conviction of faith. And if they have been able to sustain that slim hope in the face of darkness, then so must I... and so must the Church.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“Love was as hardwired into the structure of the universe as gravity and matter.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“The problem with being passionately in love ... is that it deprives you of too much sleep.”
― Dan Simmons, The Rise of Endymion

“Where religious values might be relative, intellectual values fleeting, moral values ambiguous, and aesthetic values dependent upon an observer, the existence value of any thing is infinite—thus the “mountains in the sun”—and being infinite, equal to every other thing and all truths.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“In the beginning was the Word.
In the end . . . past honor, past life, past caring . . .
In the end will be the Word.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“In the last few months, perhaps because he has had no one to speak to -- or at least no interlocutor who can respond with actual out-loud speech -- he has learned how to let different parts of his mind and heart speak within him as if they were different souls with their own arguments.”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“I know the fucking Bible, and there ain't no fucking Book of Leviathan.”
― Dan Simmons

“Sol, listen,” came the Voice, modulated now so it did not boom from far above but almost whispered in his ear, “the future of humankind depends upon your choice. Can you offer Rachel out of love, if not obedience?” Sol heard the answer in his mind even as he groped for the words. There would be no more offerings. Not this day. Not any day. Humankind had suffered enough for its love of gods, its long search for God. He thought of the many centuries in which his people, the Jews, had negotiated with God, complaining, bickering, decrying the unfairness of things but always—always—returning to obedience at whatever the cost. Generations dying in the ovens of hatred. Future generations scarred by the cold fires of radiation and renewed hatred. Not this time. Not ever again.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“Failing tastes of bile and dog vomit. Shame on any man who gets used to that taste.”
― Dan Simmons, Olympos

“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, The Rise of Endymion

“Those who ignore history’s lessons in the ultimate folly of war are forced to do more than relive them … they may be forced to die by them.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“The young remember most deeply”
― Dan Simmons, The Rise of Endymion

“They made love then. Kassad, at twenty-three standard years, had been in love once and had enjoyed sex many times. He thought he knew the way and the why of it. There was nothing in his experience to that moment which he could not have described with a phrase and a laugh to his squadmates in the hold of a troop transport. With the calm, sure cynicism of a twenty-three-year-old veteran he was sure that he would never experience anything that could not be so described, so dismissed. He was wrong. He could never adequately share the sense of the next few minutes with anyone else. He would never try.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“I explained my opinion of the ship’s logic. “That is a strange designation,” said the ship. “While I have certain organic elements incorporated into my substructure and decentralized DNA computing components, I am not—in the strictest sense of the term—a biological organism. I have no digestive system. No need for elimination, other than the occasional waste gas and passenger effluvium. Therefore, I have no anus in either real or figurative terms. Therefore, I hardly believe I could qualify to be called an …” “Shut up,” I said.”
― Dan Simmons, The Rise of Endymion