Endymion Quotes

“The shortest route to courage is absolute ignorance.”
― Dan Simmons, Endymion

“I loved you backward and forward in time. I loved you beyond boundaries of time and space.”
― Dan Simmons, Endymion

“But as with so many things in our lives, the reason for doing something is not the important thing. It is the fact of doing that remains.”
― Dan Simmons, Endymion

“The universe is indifferent to our fates. This was the crushing burden that the character took with him as he struggled through the surf toward survival or extinction. The universe just does not give a shit.”
― Dan Simmons, Endymion

“Meaning no disrespect, sir, but there's no way in the Good Lord's fucking universe that anyone can bar accidents or the unexpected.”
― Dan Simmons, Endymion

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

“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

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

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

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

“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

“So many important things pass quickly without being understood at the time. So many powerful moments are buried beneath the absurd.”
― Dan Simmons, Endymion

“Designed from DNA to compute,” I said, appalled at the thought of Core machines being given the benefit of the doubt when it came to souls.”
― Dan Simmons, Endymion

“And then Robinson Crusoe stripped naked, swam out to his ship, filled his pockets with biscuits, and swam back to shore...."

"What?" I said, hefting my pack and frowning at the child.

"Nothing," she said, getting to her feet. "Just an old preHegira book that Uncle Martin used to read to me. He used to say that proofreaders have always been incompetent assholes-even 1400 years ago.”
― Dan Simmons, Endymion

“The fabric of space/time is much like one of the elaborate Vatican tapestries, thinks Nemes, and she who begins pulling on loose threads does so at the peril of watching the whole tapestry ravel.”
― Dan Simmons, Endymion

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

“Philosophical poetry by moonlight was all right, but guns that shot straight and true were a necessity.”
― Dan Simmons, Endymion

“I’m hungry, Raul,” she said from the head of the stairs. “Want to go down and see what this old ship’s galley can whomp up for lunch?”
― Dan Simmons, Endymion

“If we had some cheese, we could have a ham-and-cheese sandwich,” replies Father Captain de Soya, “if we had some ham.”
― Dan Simmons, Endymion

“You’re upsetting a delicate balance of corruption that has existed here for centuries.”
― Dan Simmons, Endymion

“Life is brutal that way … the loss of irrecoverable moments amid trivia and distraction.”
― Dan Simmons, Endymion

“As your priest,” says de Soya, “I will warn you again about the use of profanity. As your commanding officer, I order you to come up with as many surprises as you can to kill that spiked son of a bitch.” They”
― Dan Simmons, Endymion

“Have you ever noticed how on a trip—even a very long one—it is often the first week or so that stands out most clearly in your memory? Perhaps it is the enhanced perception that voyages bring, or perhaps it is an effect of orientation response on the senses, or perhaps it is simply that even the charm of newness soon wears off, but it has been my experience that the first days in a new place, or seeing new people, often set the tone for the rest of the trip. Or in this case, the rest of my life.”
― Dan Simmons, Endymion

“The universe is indifferent to our fates.”
― Dan Simmons, Endymion

“shortest route to courage is absolute ignorance.”
― Dan Simmons, Endymion

“Doomed with enfeebled carcass to outstretch His loathed existence through ten centuries,”
― Dan Simmons, Endymion

“If you are reading this, you are almost certainly reading it for the wrong reason. But as with so many things in our lives, the reason for doing something is not the important thing. It is the fact of doing that remains. Only the immutable facts that I have written this and you are reading it remain important in the end.”
― Dan Simmons, Endymion

“Technically, according to the ancient enigma of quantum physics, I am now neither dead nor alive. I am in the suspended state of overlapping probability waves once reserved for the cat in Schrödinger’s thought experiment. Because the hull of the cat box is little more than position-fused energy ready to explode at the slightest intrusion, no one will ever look inside to see if I am dead or alive. Theoretically, no one is directly responsible for my execution, since the immutable laws of quantum theory pardon or condemn me from each microsecond to the next. There are no observers.
But I am an observer. I am waiting for this particular collapse of probability waves with something more than detached interest. In the instant after the hissing of cyanide gas begins, but before it reaches my lungs and heart and brain, I will know which way the universe has chosen to sort itself out.
At least, I will know so far as I am concerned. Which, when it comes right down to it, is the only aspect of the universe’s resolution with which most of us are concerned.”
― Dan Simmons, Endymion

“I have made command decisions based upon insights which would not have seemed totally logical outside the context of my experience and training.”
― Dan Simmons, Endymion

“the suicidal smell of cigarettes,”
― Dan Simmons, Endymion