The Terror Quotes

“Luckily, even as a young man not yet become himself, John Bridgens had two things besides indecision that kept him from self-destruction - books and a sense of irony.”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“We are all eaters of souls.”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“All this natural misery,” Dr. Goodsir said suddenly. “Why do you men have to add to it? Why does our species always have to take our full measure of God-given misery and terror and mortality and then make it worse? Can you answer me that, Mr. Hickey?”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“Francis Crozier believes in nothing. 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. Nothing he has learned in the past six months has persuaded him otherwise.

Has it?”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“Men who read a lot have a more sensitive disposition, added Fowler. [...]

I did not know what to say to this.

Maybe reading is a sort of curse is all I mean, concluded Fowler. Maybe it's better for a man to stay inside his own mind.

Amen, I felt like saying, although I do not know why.”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“He loved the darkness and the mystery of the Catholic service--the tall priest strutting like a carrion crow and pronouncing magic in a dead language, the immediate magic of the Eucharist bringing the dead back to life so that the faithful could devour Him and become of Him, the smell of incense and the mystical chanting.”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“The words sounded like a mournful incantation.”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“Why does our species always have to take our full measure of God-given misery and terror and mortality and then make it worse?”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“He enjoyed the soft sound of night wind and the knowledge that he was the only boy — perhaps the only human being — out there in the dark on the windy, frozen-grass meadows on this night that smelled of coming snow, alienated from the lighted windows and the warm hearths, very aware that he was of the village but not part of it at that moment. It was a thrilling, almost erotic feeling — an illicit discovery of self separated from everyone and everything else in the cold and dark”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Francis Crozier now understood that the most desirable and erotic thing a woman could wear were the many modest layers such as Sophia Cracroft wore to dinner in the governor's house, enough silken fabric to conceal the lines of her body, allowing a man to concentrate on the exciting loveliness of her wit”
― Dan simmons, The Terror

“The beauty of being dead, he knows now, is that there is no pain and no sense of self.”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“Outside, though perhaps morning, it is still night, but a night of a thousand thrusting colors laid over the shaking stars. The shattering ice still sounds like a drumbeat.”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“who, like Crozier, would rather have his kidney stones removed with a spoon than be forced to suffer sermons —”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“I wish I could help him. I wish I could help the dozens of other Sufferers - all the victims of wounds, maulings, burns, diseases, incipient malnutrition, and melancholic despair - aboard this entrapped ship and her sister ship. I wish I could help myself, for already I am showing the early signs of Nostalgia and Debility.

But there is little that I - or any surgeon in the Year of Our Lord 1848 - can do.

God help us all.”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“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

“Maybe reading is a sort of curse is all I mean, concluded Fowler. Maybe it’s better for a man to stay inside his own mind.”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

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

“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

“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

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

“Hobbes’s Leviathan. Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“Trust me. I’ve seen it in London and I’ve seen it with shipwreck. Death by scurvy is worse. It would be better if the Thing took us all tonight. And with that we went below to the flame-flickering Darkness of the lower deck and to a cold almost the equal of the Dante-esque Ninth Circle Arctic Night without.”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“God is our refuge and strength, and ever-prethent help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountainth fall into the heart of the sea, though its waterth roar and foam and the mountains quake with their thurging.”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“it’s the mind analogy that bothers Crozier the most. Haunted and plagued by melancholia much of his life, knowing it as a secret weakness made worse by his twelve winters frozen in arctic darkness as an adult, feeling it recently triggered into active agony by Sophia Cracroft’s rejection”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“I was always waiting for you, she sent.”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror