Dan Simmons Quotes

58 Sourced Quotes

Want to talk about Shakespeare's sonnets?" asked Orphu of Io. Are you shitting me?" The moravecs loved the ancient human colloquial phrases, the more scatological the better. Yes," said Orphu. "I am most definitely shitting you, my friend.

Dan Simmons
Those who ignore history's lessons in the ultimate folly of war are forced to do more than relive them... they may be forced to die by them.

Dan Simmons
I loved you backward and forward in time. I loved you beyond boundaries of time and space.

Dan Simmons
Pain and darkness have been our lot since the Fall of Man. But 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
I know what cancer was. How is it like humankind?" Sek Hardeen's perfectly modulated, softly accented tones showed a hint of agitation. "We have spread out through the galaxy like cancer cells through a living body, Duré. We multiply without thought to the countless life forms that must die or be pushed aside so that we may breed and flourish. We eradicate competing forms of intelligent life.

Dan Simmons
It no longer matters who consider themselves the masters of events. Events no longer obey their masters.

Dan Simmons
Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion

Dan Simmons
There is no doubt that I have discovered the ultimate in stagnant human societies. The Bikura have realized the human dream of immortality and have paid for it with their humanity and their immortal souls.

Dan Simmons
This is every writer's nightmare—the sudden breakdown of meaning in the language that sustains and supports us...

Dan Simmons
Human beings have only that confusing mass of chemically driven neurological storage to rely on. They're all subjective and emotion-tinged. How can they trust any of their memories?

Dan Simmons
There is a fullness and calmness there which can come only from knowing pain.

Dan Simmons
The life of a poet lies not merely in the finite language-dance of expression but in the nearly infinite combinations of perception and memory combined with the sensitivity to what is perceived and remembered.

Dan Simmons
Losing our ignorance can be dangerous because our ignorance is a shield.

Dan Simmons
Nobody gets beyond a petroleum economy. Not while there's petroleum there.

Dan Simmons
How could anyone stay sane with entire lifetimes stored in one human mind?

Dan Simmons
Evolution brings human beings. Human beings, through a long and painful process, bring humanity.

Dan Simmons
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 Great Change is when humankind accepts its role as part of the natural order of the universe instead of its role as a cancer

Dan Simmons
Belief in one's identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one's immortality... and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.

Dan Simmons
Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers.

Dan Simmons
The past is dead and buried. But I know now that buried things have a way of rising to the surface when one least expects them to.

Dan Simmons
In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure.

Dan Simmons
History viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.

Dan Simmons
Speaking as a novelist myself, I know that members of our profession live in our imaginations as much or more as we inhabit what people call 'the real world'...

Dan Simmons
Sometimes... dreams are all that separate us from the machines.

Dan Simmons
Any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principal which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being evil.

Dan Simmons
His imagination was always more real than the reality of daily life.

Dan Simmons
Barbarians, we call them, while all the while we timidly cling to our Web like Visigoths crouching in the ruins of Rome's faded glory and proclaim ourselves civilized.

Dan Simmons