Top 400 Dan Simmons Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Its hard to die. Harder to live.”

— Dan Simmons

2. “Stupidity has a price and it always gets paid.”

— Dan Simmons

3. “Context is to data what water is to a dolphin.”

— Dan Simmons

4. “Love is nothing but lust misspelled.”

— Dan Simmons

5. “In the end – when all else is dust – loyalty to those we love is all we can carry with us to the grave. Faith – true faith – was trusting in that love.”

— Dan Simmons

6. “Arete is simply excellence and the striving for excellence in all things,” said Odysseus. “Arete simply means the act of offering all actions as a sort of sacrament to excellence, of devoting one’s life to finding excellence, identifying it when it offers itself, and achieving it in your own life.”

— Dan Simmons

7. “In such seconds of decision entire futures are made.”

— Dan Simmons

8. “Words are the only bullets in truth’s bandolier. And poets are the snipers.”

— Dan Simmons

9. “This is every writer’s nightmare – the sudden breakdown of meaning in the language that sustains and supports us...”

— Dan Simmons

10. “Mobs have passions, not brains.”

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

12. “Words are the light and sound of our existence, the heat lightning by which the night is illuminated.”

— Dan Simmons

13. “No one inspired me to write, but writer Harlan Ellison terrified me into getting published.”

— Dan Simmons

14. “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

15. “The sum of the crowd’s IQ was far below that of its most modest single member. Mobs have passions, not brains.”

— Dan Simmons

16. “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

17. “Tempus edax rerum.”

— Dan Simmons

18. “There is a fullness and calmness there which can come only from knowing pain.”

— Dan Simmons

19. “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

20. “There’s a unique bond of trust between readers and authors that I don’t believe exists in any other art form; as a reader, I trust a novelist to give me his or her best effort, however flawed.”

— Dan Simmons

21. “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

22. “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

23. “Accidents are like death. Waiting for us everywhere. Inevitable. Unavoidable. Plan as we might, they defy our planning.”

— Dan Simmons

24. “Colonel Fedmahn Kassad knew only that all the great passions of a passionate life had led him to this place and to this moment, and if death awaited him here, then so be it. And if love and glory and a victory that would make Valhalla quake awaited, then so be it.”

— Dan Simmons

25. “I loved you backward and forward in time. I loved you beyond boundaries of time and space.”

— Dan Simmons

26. “Francis Bacon once said, “There arises from a bad and unapt formation of words a wonderful obstruction to the mind.”

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

28. “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

29. “Sol Weintraub suddenly understood perfectly why Abraham had agreed to sacrifice Isaac, his son, when the Lord commanded him to do so. It was not obedience. It was not even to put the love of God above the love of his son. Abraham was testing God. By denying the sacrifice at the last moment, by stopping the knife, God had earned the right – in Abraham’s eyes and the hearts of his offspring – to become the God of Abraham. Sol.”

— Dan Simmons

30. “Sol Weintraub had come to a single, unshakable conclusion: any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principle which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being was evil.”

— Dan Simmons

31. “It occurs to me that our survival may depend upon our talking to one another.”

— Dan Simmons

32. “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

33. “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

34. “It no longer matters who consider themselves the masters of events. Events no longer obey their masters.”

— Dan Simmons

35. “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

36. “The shortest route to courage is absolute ignorance.”

— Dan Simmons

37. “Nobody gets beyond a petroleum economy. Not while there’s petroleum there.”

— Dan Simmons

38. “After fifty-five years of dedicating his life and work to the story of ethical systems, Sol Weintraub had come to a single, unshakable conclusion: any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principal which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being was evil.”

— Dan Simmons

39. “Can God play a significant game with his own creature? Can any creator, even a limited one, play a significant game with his own creature?”

— Dan Simmons

40. “Mountaineers know that all mountains are in a constant state of collapse – their verticality being inescapably and inevitably worn down every moment by wind, water, weather, and gravity – but.”

— Dan Simmons

41. “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

42. “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

43. “We were gods then. But even gods must descend from their high thrones upon occasion.”

— Dan Simmons

44. “The whole planet reeks of mysticism without revelation.”

— Dan Simmons

45. “It started 25 years ago, when I was teaching elementary school in a small town in Missouri.”

— Dan Simmons

46. “The universe is indifferent to our fates.”

— Dan Simmons

47. “Evolution brings human beings. Human beings, through a long and painful process, bring humanity.”

— Dan Simmons

48. “Mark Twain once opined in his homey way: “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.”

— Dan Simmons

49. “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

50. “I am tired of this city. I am tired of its pagan pretensions and false histories. Hyperion is a poet’s world devoid of poetry. Keats itself is a mixture of tawdry, false classicism and mindless, boomtown energy.”

— Dan Simmons