Dan Simmons > Quotes

“God did not choose Herod or Pontius Pilate or Caesar Augustus as His instrument. He chose the unknown son of an unknown carpenter in one of the least important stretches of the Roman Empire.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“The universe just does not give a shit.”
― Dan Simmons, Endymion

“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.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“The only true voyage, the only Fountain of Youth,” recited Orphu, “would be found not in traveling to strange lands but in having different eyes, in seeing the universe with the eyes of another person, of a hundred others, and seeing the hundred universes each of them sees, which each of them is.”
― Dan Simmons, Ilium

“[The Void Which Binds] actual but unaccessible presence in our universe is one of the prime causes for our species elaborating myth and religion, for our stubborn, blind belief in extrasensory powers, in telepathy and precognition, in demons and demigods and resurrection and reincarnation and ghosts and messiahs and so many other categories of almost-but-not-quite satisfying bullshit.”
― Dan Simmons, The Rise of Endymion

“The captain of HMS Terror often thought that he knew nothing about the future - other than that his ship and Erebus would never again steam or sail - but then he reminded himself of one certainty: when his store of whiskey was gone, Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier was going to blow his brains out.”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“Thus evolved some members of the Core—not altruists, but desperate survivalists who realized that the only way ultimately to win their never-ending zero-sum game was to stop the game. And to stop the game they needed to evolve into a species capable of empathy.”
― Dan Simmons, The Rise of Endymion

“Siri whispered an answer to my unasked question. "No, Merin, one is never really too old. At least not too old to want the warmth and closeness. You decide, my love. I will be content either way." I decided. Towards the dawn we slept.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“He was, in other words, a careful man with careless impulses.”
― Dan Simmons, Drood

“Seduction, he knew, was both science and art—a blend of skill, discipline, proximity, and opportunity. Mostly proximity.”
― Dan Simmons, Ilium

“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.”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“A human being on this world, Duane realized with a shock of recognition approaching vertigo, made no more permanent impression than does a hand thrust in water. Remove the hand, and water rushes in to fill the void as if nothing had ever been there.”
― Dan Simmons, Summer of Night

“The Hegemony and its relationship with the Ousters aren’t my worry now. I sincerely wish a plague on both their houses."

To the extent that humanity suffers?”

“I don’t know humanity,” said the Consul in an exhausted monotone. “I do know Sol Weintraub. And Rachel. And an injured woman named Brawne Lamia. And Father Paul Duré. And Fedmahn Kassad. And—”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“Sol! Take your daughter, your only daughter, Rachel, whom you love, and go to the world called Hyperion and offer her there as a burnt offering at one of the places of which I shall tell you.”
― 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.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“sounding now/old songs/deep water/no-Great Voices/no-Shark/old songs/new songs”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“Sometimes,” said General Morpurgo, taking her hand, “dreams are all that separate us from the machines.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“No one wants to pay for a look at another person's angst.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“Entropy is a bitch,”
― Dan Simmons, Endymion

“Children bring chaos and clutter and an infinite potential for the future”
― Dan Simmons, The Rise of Endymion

“Sometimes there is a thin line separating orthodox zeal from apostasy,' said Father Lenar Hoyt”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“Even as he watched, a star moved above the limb of the planet, laser weapons winked their ruby morse”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“Asshole cunt peepee fuck.” “Ah,” grinned Old Sludge, showing his one tooth, “going to the company store to get some algae chewies, huh?” “Goddamn poopoo,” I would grin back at him.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“Very few conversations with Charles Dickens did not include a laugh from him. I had never met a man so given to laughter. Almost no moment or context was too serious for this author not to find some levity in it, as some of us had discovered to our embarrassment at funerals.”
― Dan Simmons, Drood

“… Thou art a dreaming thing; A fever of thyself—think of the Earth; What bliss even in hope is there for thee? What haven? every creature hath its home; Every sole man hath days of joy and pain, Whether his labours be sublime or low— The pain alone; the joy alone; distinct: Only the dreamer venoms all his days, Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“Forcing school children to recite a national pledge doesn’t sound very American to me,” said James. “No,” agreed Holmes. “It sounds German. Very German.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fifth Heart

“I nevertheless understood at that second the ancient obsession of the God-fearing for another kind of fear: the thrill of exorcism, the mindless whirl of Dervish possession, and the almost erotic surrender of seance, speaking in tongues, and Zen Gnostic trance. I realized at that instant just how surely the affirmation of demons or the summoning of Satan somehow can affirm the reality of their mystic antithesis -the God of Abraham.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“But he had once told Watson that the “less or fewer” issue, along with the use of “I” in such sentences as “He gave the money to Sheila and I”, inflicted on the public by people who considered themselves well-educated, could be drastically reduced in frequency—if not actually abolished—by a few well-aimed pistol shots and an explanatory note that would be pinned to the victims’ chests.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fifth Heart

“Arete is simply excellence and the striving for excellence in all things,” said Odysseus. “Arete simply means the act of offering all actions as a sort of sacrament to excellence, of devoting one’s life to finding excellence, identifying it when it offers itself, and achieving it in your own life.”
― Dan Simmons, Ilium

“I remembered Grandam telling me about an early Old Earth scientist, one Charles Darwin, who had come up with one of the early theories of evolution or gravitation or somesuch, and how—although raised a devout Christian even before the reward of the cruciform—he had become an atheist while studying a terrestrial wasp that paralyzed some large species of spider, planted its embryo, and let the spider recover and go about its business until it was time for the hatched wasp larvae to burrow its way out of the living spider’s abdomen.”
― Dan Simmons, Endymion