Top 400 Dan Simmons Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Meina Gladstone sat at the head of the long table and felt the peculiar and not-unpleasant sense of separateness which comes from far too little sleep over far too long a period.”

— Dan Simmons

52. “Sometimes there is a thin line separating orthodox zeal from apostasy,” said Father Lenar Hoyt. So began the priest’s story.”

— Dan Simmons

53. “We are all eaters of souls.”

— Dan Simmons

54. “Life is brutal that way... the loss of irrecoverable moments amid trivia and distraction.”

— Dan Simmons

55. “Among us we represent islands of time as well as separate oceans of perspective.”

— Dan Simmons

56. “We will revel in hardships and welcome strangeness.”

— Dan Simmons

57. “Sol! Take your daughter, your only daughter, Rachel, whom you love, and go to the world called Hyperion and offer her there as a burnt offering at one of the places of which I shall tell you.”

— Dan Simmons

58. “Martin Silenus sniffed a jar, found a knife on the sandwich plate, and added great dollops of horseradish to his sandwich. His eyes sparkled with tears as he ate.”

— Dan Simmons

59. “There are real disadvantages to fighting in the nude when one’s opponents are dressed, but the greatest problem is psychological. If you can get over the sense of heightened vulnerability, the rest is easy to compensate for.”

— Dan Simmons

60. “Each heart has its graveyard, each household its dead, And knells ring around us wherever we tread, And the feet that awhile made our pathway so bright Pass on to a land that is out of our sight.”

— Dan Simmons

61. “But this is human life: the war, the deeds, The disappointment, the anxiety, Imagination’s struggles, far and nigh, All human; bearing in themselves this good, That they are still the air, the subtle food, To make us feel existence, and to show How quiet death is. Where soil is men grow, Whether to weeds or flowers; but for me, There is no depth to strike in.”

— Dan Simmons

62. “To make love to the one true person who deserves that love is one of the few absolute rewards of being a human being, balancing all of the pain, loss, awkwardness, loneliness, idiocy, compromise, and clumsiness that go with the human condition. To make love to the right person makes up for a lot of mistakes.”

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

64. “Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion.”

— Dan Simmons

65. “I now understand the need for faith – pure, blind, fly-in-the-face-of-reason faith – as a small life preserver in the wild and endless sea of a universe ruled by unfeeling laws and totally indifferent to the small, reasoning beings that inhabit it.”

— Dan Simmons

66. “Love was as hardwired into the structure of the universe as gravity and matter.”

— Dan Simmons

67. “Stand as I did after throwing the switch, a murderer, a betrayer, but still proud, feet firmly planted on Hyperion’s shifting sand, head held high, fist raised against the sky, crying “A plague on both your houses!”

— Dan Simmons

68. “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

69. “If everyone could understand the working of a psychopath’s mind, we undoubtedly would be closer to insanity ourselves.”

— Dan Simmons

70. “I retitled my poem The Hyperion Cantos. It was not about the planet but about the passing of the self-styled Titans called humans. It was about the unthinking hubris of a race which dared to murder its homeworld through sheer carelessness and then carried that dangerous arrogance to the stars...”

— Dan Simmons

71. “At sunrise of the third day, I saw the corpse’s chest begin to rise and fall and I heard the first intake of breath – a rasp like water being poured into a leather pouch.”

— Dan Simmons

72. “The truth is, it’s not a great career move to create a readership and then, in effect, abandon them.”

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

74. “If our god’s work is to be done in our time, we must do it ourselves.”

— Dan Simmons

75. “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

76. “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

77. “They lay together in a sheltered place among the ruins of Brasilia while deathbeams from Chinese EMVs played like blue searchlights on broken ceramic walls.”

— Dan Simmons

78. “If there is a God, I thought, it’s a painkiller.”

— Dan Simmons

79. “It is a mystery, and to tell the truth, I am intrigued by mysteries even if this is to be my last week of enjoying them. I would welcome some glimmer of understanding but, failing that, working on the puzzle will suffice.”

— Dan Simmons

80. “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

81. “Laws had a bad habit of being ignored or abrogated when societal push came to totalitarian shove.”

— Dan Simmons

82. “Sometimes,” said General Morpurgo, taking her hand, “dreams are all that separate us from the machines.”

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

84. “To see and feel one’s beloved naked for the first time is one of life’s pure, irreducible epiphanies. If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include that truth of contact or be forever hollow.”

— Dan Simmons

85. “The critic had added a personal note: Most of us, I hope, have had some child or spouse or friend like Beatrice, someone who by his very nature, his seemingly innate goodness and intelligence, makes us uncomfortably conscious of our lies when we lie.”

— Dan Simmons

86. “But as long as the task is both onerous and repetitive, I discovered, the mind is not only free to wander to more imaginative climes, it actually flees to higher planes.”

— Dan Simmons

87. “We thought we were special, opening our perceptions, honing our empathy, spilling that cauldron of shared pain onto the dance floor of language and then trying to make a minuet out of all that chaotic hurt. It doesn’t matter a damn bit. We’re no avatars, no sons of god or man. We’re only us, scribbling our conceits alone, reading alone, and dying alone.”

— Dan Simmons

88. “A human being on this world, Duane realized with a shock of recognition approaching vertigo, made no more permanent impression than does a hand thrust in water. Remove the hand, and water rushes in to fill the void as if nothing had ever been there.”

— Dan Simmons

89. “Losing our ignorance can be dangerous because our ignorance is a shield.”

— Dan Simmons

90. “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

91. “Power: a currency that never went out of style.”

— Dan Simmons

92. “Her head was on my shoulder and her breathing was so deep and regular that I thought her to be asleep. I was almost asleep myself when her warm hand slid up my leg and lightly cupped me. I was startled even as I began to stir and stiffen. Siri whispered an answer to my unasked question. “No, Merin, one is never really too old. At least not too old to want the warmth and closeness. You decide, my love. I will be content either way.” I.”

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

94. “No book or poem is ever finished, merely abandoned.”

— Dan Simmons

95. “I discovered what a mental stimulant physical labor could be; not mere physical labor, I should add, but absolutely spine-bending, lung-racking, gut-ripping, ligament-tearing, and ball-breaking physical labor. But as long as the task is both onerous and repetitive, I discovered, the mind is not only free to wander to more imaginative climes, it actually flees to higher planes.”

— Dan Simmons

96. “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

97. “No lifetime is long enough for those who wish to create, Raul. Or for those who simply wish to understand themselves and their lives. It is, perhaps, the curse of being human, but also a blessing.”

— Dan Simmons

98. “Sol remembered the dream, remembered his daughter’s hug, and realized that 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

99. “We are created for precisely this sort of suffering. In the end, it is all we are, these limpid tide pools of self-consciousness between crashing waves of pain. We are destined and designed to bear our pain with us, hugging it tight to our bellies like the young Spartan thief hiding a wolf cub so it can eat away our insides. What other creature in God’s wide domain would carry the memory.”

— Dan Simmons

100. “The Chinese poet George Wu... recorded on his comlog: “Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.” Later, on his last disk to his lover the week before he died, Wu said: “Words are the only bullets in truth’s bandolier. And poets are the snipers.”

— Dan Simmons