Dan Simmons Quotes

58 Sourced Quotes

Once evolution gets a good basic design, it tends to throw away the variants and concentrate on the near-infinite diversity within that design.

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

Dan Simmons
I despair at the rise of modern violence. I truly give in to despair at times, that deep, futureless pit of despair.... I watch the American slaughterhouse, the casual attacks on popes, presidents, and uncounted others, and I wonder if there are many more out there with the Ability or if butchery has simply become the modern way of life.

Dan Simmons
Doing a life study while drunk and in the process of being seduced is never a formula for quality art.

Dan Simmons
Poetry is only secondarily about words. Primarily, it is about truth. I dealt with the Ding an Sich, the substance behind the shadow, weaving powerful concepts, similes, and connections the way an engineer would raise a skyscraper with the whiskered-alloy skeleton being constructed long before the glass and plastic and chromaluminum appears.

Dan Simmons
The future is like smoke from a burning forest, waiting for the wind of specific events and personal courage to blow the sparks and embers of reality this way or that.

Dan Simmons
Fate and victory shift... now this way, now that way -- like a line of unarmored men under a hail of enemy arrows.

Dan Simmons
If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include the truth of contact or be forever hollow.

Dan Simmons
Pain is an interesting and off-putting thing. Few if any things in life concentrate our attention so completely and terribly, and few things are more boring to listen to or read about.

Dan Simmons
Life is brutal that way... the loss of irrecoverable moments amid trivia and distraction.

Dan Simmons
A token of ecological awareness in a society devoted to self destruction and waste but unwilling to acknowledge its indulgent ways.

Dan Simmons
Nothing helps an artist's career more than a little death and obscurity.

Dan Simmons
The powerful have received their share of the world's attention even when their power has been shown as sheer evil. The victim's remain the faceless masses. Numbers. Mass graves. These monsters have fertilized our century with the mass graves of their victims and it is time that the powerless had names and faces -- and voices.

Dan Simmons
We are not the only avatars of humanity. Once our computing machines achieved self-consciousness, they became part of this design.

Dan Simmons
All of our lives are governed by a certain degree of faith in bullshit.

Dan Simmons
The love of violence is an aspect of our humanity. Even the weak wish to be strong primarily so they can wield the whip.

Dan Simmons
Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.

Dan Simmons
There is a certain solipsism to serious illness which claims all of one's attention as certainly as an astronomical black hole seizes anything unlucky enough to fall within its critical radius.

Dan Simmons
Artists recognize other artists as soon as the pencil begins to move.

Dan Simmons
Laws had a bad habit of being ignored or abrogated when societal push came to totalitarian shove.

Dan Simmons
If our god's work is to be done in our time, we must do it ourselves.

Dan Simmons
Love was as hardwired into the structure of the universe as gravity and matter.

Dan Simmons
Mystery. The strangeness of place so necessary to some creative spirits. A perfect mixture of the classical utopia and the pagan mystery.

Dan Simmons
War must never be a condition but, rather, a temporary scourge which we suffer as a child does a fever, knowing that health follows the long night of pain and that peace is health.

Dan Simmons
The sum of the crowd's IQ was far below that of its most modest single member. Mobs have passions, not brains.

Dan Simmons
Every age fraught with discord and danger seems to spawn a leader meant only for that age, a political giant whose absence, in retrospect, seems inconceivable when the history of that age is written.

Dan Simmons
Religion seems to have always offered us that false duality... the silences of infinite space or the cozy comfort of inner certainty.

Dan Simmons
Words are the light and sound of our existence, the heat lightning by which the night is illuminated.

Dan Simmons
A hero. 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
Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.

Dan Simmons