Dan Simmons > Quotes

“Reading your sonnets?” asked Orphu. Mahnmut closed the book. “How’d you know? Have you taken up telepathy now that you’ve lost your eyes?” “Not yet,” rumbled the Ionian. Orphu’s great crab shell was lashed to the deck ten meters from where Mahnmut sat near the bow. “Some of your silences are more literary than others, is all.”
― Dan Simmons, Ilium

“Why . . .” she begins. “Why do you want to climb it?”
“Because it’s there.”
― Dan Simmons, Worlds Enough & Time: Five Tales of Speculative Fiction

“We’ve been stuck in one species since our Cro-Magnon ancestors helped to wipe out the smarter Neanderthals,” she said. “Now it’s our chance to diversify rapidly, and institutions like the Hegemony, the Pax, and the Core are stopping it.”
― Dan Simmons, The Rise of Endymion

“If there is a God, I thought, it’s a painkiller.”
― Dan Simmons, Endymion

“Commander Lebedev wrote—‘After a communication session we invited Flight Engineer Savitskaya to the heavily laden table. We gave Sveta a blue floral print apron and told her, “ ‘Look, Sveta, even though you are a pilot and cosmonaut, you are still a woman first. Would you please do us the honor of being our hostess tonight?’ “
“Ouch,” says Roth”
― Dan Simmons, Worlds Enough & Time: Five Tales of Speculative Fiction

“It seemed that Abraham had offered to murder his son to test a phantom. It seemed that Sol had brought his dying daughter through hundreds of light-years and innumerable hardships in response to nothing. But now, as the Sphinx loomed above him and the first hint of sunrise paled Hyperion’s sky, Sol realized that he had responded to a force more basic and persuasive than the Shrike’s terror or pain’s dominion. If he was right—and he did not know but felt—then love was as hardwired into the structure of the universe as gravity and matter/antimatter. There was room for some sort of God not in the web between the walls, nor in the singularity cracks in the pavement, nor somewhere out before and beyond the sphere of things … but in the very warp and woof of things. Evolving as the universe evolved. Learning as the learning-able parts of the universe learned. Loving as humankind loved.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“But Siri knew the slow pace of books and the cadences of theater under the stars. I knew only the stars.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“In his twenties, John Bridgens most identified with Hamlet. The strangely aging Prince of Denmark—Bridgens was quite sure that the boy Hamlet had magically aged over a few theatrical weeks to a man who was, at the very least, in his thirties by Act V—had been suspended between thought and deed, between motive and action, frozen by a consciousness so astute and unrelenting that it made him think about everything, even thought itself.”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“Dad,” said Rachel, “I’m going to ask you a question I’ve asked about a million times since I was two. Do you believe in God?” Sol had not smiled. He had no choice but to give her the answer he had given her a million times. “I’m waiting to,” he said.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“Among us we represent islands of time as well as separate oceans of perspective.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“Anticlimax is, of course, the warp and way of things. Real life seldom structures a decent denouement.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“She would follow him there. And she would die there -- and die soon. Of misery and of strangeness and of all the vicious, petty, alien, and unbridled thoughts that would pour into her like the poison from the Goldner tins poured into Fitzjames -- unseen, vile, deadly.”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“The cybrid allows me to carry out my role in the datumplane community.” “As poet?” Johnny smiled again. “More as poem,” he said. “A poem?” “An ongoing work of art … but not in the human sense. A puzzle perhaps. A variable enigma which occasionally offers unusual insights into more serious lines of analysis.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“I wish we had the technology to fight God on an equal basis,” he said in low, tight tones. “To beard him in his den. To fight back for all of the injustices heaped on humanity. To allow him to alter his smug arrogance or be blown to hell.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“Are we all illusions? Brief shadows thrown on a white wall for the shallow amusement of bored gods? Is this all?”
― Dan Simmons, Song of Kali

“all good things beyond sleep come precisely because we defy gravity while we live. Besides, somewhere in the basement of The Jolly Corner to this day, mildewing amidst the pages of an equally mildewed paperback, is a 3-x-5 card on which I had scribbled this quote from Flaubert: Books aren’t made the way babies are: they are made like pyramids. There’s some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it’s back-breaking, sweaty, time-consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands there on the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and the bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison. I was eight when I jotted down that quote, but even then, the part I enjoyed the most was the delightful “Continue this comparison.” And even then, I understood at once that the pissing jackals were critics.”
― Dan Simmons, A Winter Haunting

“guile was no match for the world and that hubris would always be punished by the gods.”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“As Ummon and the other Masters teach, it explains why the giraffe evolved a long neck but never why the other animals did not. It explains why humankind evolved to intelligence, but not why the tree near the front gate refused to.”
― Dan Simmons

“She had always felt that the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unself-conscious flow of little things—”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“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 all too shakable convention of faith. And they have been able to sustain that slim hope in the face of darkness, then so must I.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“There were reprints of American editorials. Liberals saw it as a resurgence of social protest and decried the discrimination, poverty, and hunger that had provoked it. Conservative columnists acidly pointed out that hungry people don’t steal stereo systems first and called for a crackdown in law enforcement. All of the reasoned editorials sounded hollow in light of the perverse randomness of the event. It was as if only a thin wall of electric lighting protected the great cities of the world from total barbarism.”
― Dan Simmons, Song of Kali

“In an interstellar society where the Church ruled all but absolutely, news awaited not only independent confirmation but official permission to exist.”
― Dan Simmons, The Rise of Endymion

“If there really was a goddess like Sedna who ruled the world, her real name was Bitch Irony.”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“Here’s the deal. Willi’s bought the rights to a paperback best-seller called The White Slaver. It’s a piece of formulized shit written for illiterate fourteen-year-olds and the kind of lobotomized housewife that lines up to buy the new Harlequin romances each month. Jack-off material for intellectual quadriplegics. Naturally it sold about three million copies. We”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“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.” Sol hesitated and looked back to Rachel. The baby’s eyes were deep and luminous as she looked up at her father. Sol felt the unspoken yes. Holding her tightly, he stepped forward into the darkness and raised his voice against the silence: “Listen! There will be no more offerings, neither child nor parent. There will be no more sacrifices for anyone other than our fellow human. The time of obedience and atonement is past.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“I was full of piss and vinegar in those days, not to mention too stupid to know better, in other words still in my twenties,”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“there must be some hope that we can rise to a higher level … that consciousness can evolve to a plane more benevolent than its counterpoint of a universe hardwired to indifference.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“... The continuation of her life was more than another day of breathing, but was the gift of another day of engagement with her beloved across the spectrum of all things.”
― Dan Simmons, Olympos

“a person born and raised into a world where information was always at hand, communication with anyone anywhere a given, and no distance more than a farcaster step away, this sudden regression to life as our ancestors had known it would be like suddenly awakening blind and crippled.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“The strongest beings are those who sing themselves into existence.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fifth Heart