Top 400 Dan Simmons Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “You have to live to really know things, my love.”

— Dan Simmons

105. “It’s one of the strangest attributes of this profession that when we writers get exhausted writing one thing, we relax by writing another.”

— Dan Simmons

106. “I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember’d.”

— Dan Simmons

107. “Did you see any of us there?” Kassad said nothing for more than a minute. The soft sounds of the river and the ship’s rigging suddenly seemed very loud. Finally Kassad took a breath. “Yes.” Silence stretched again. Brawne Lamia broke it. “Will you tell us who?” “No.”

— Dan Simmons

108. “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

109. “Where religious values might be relative, intellectual values fleeting, moral values ambiguous, and aesthetic values dependent upon an observer, the existence value of any thing is infinite – thus the “mountains in the sun” – and being infinite, equal to every other thing and all truths.”

— Dan Simmons

110. “If we had some cheese, we could have a ham-and-cheese sandwich,” replies Father Captain de Soya, “if we had some ham.”

— Dan Simmons

111. “Henry James hated epilogues and refused to use them in his fiction. He said that life granted us no “epilogues”, so why should art or literature?”

— Dan Simmons

112. “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

113. “I desperately want to talk to her now. I want to ask her who it was who so deftly crafted and shaped the legend that was our love.”

— Dan Simmons

114. “God did not choose Herod or Pontius Pilate or Caesar Augustus as His instrument. He chose the unknown son of an unknown carpenter in one of the least important stretches of the Roman Empire.”

— Dan Simmons

115. “Spenser Reynolds began telling about his next project – an attempt to have suicides coordinate their leaps from bridges on a score of worlds while the All Thing watched – and Tyrena Wingreen-Feif stole all attention by putting her arm around Monsignor Edouard and inviting him to her after-dinner nude swimming party at her floating estate on Mare Infinitus. I.”

— Dan Simmons

116. “Natalie’s father had a saying for that behavior – Stupidity has a price and it always gets paid.”

— Dan Simmons

117. “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

118. “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.”

— Dan Simmons

119. “His imagination was always more real than the reality of daily life.”

— Dan Simmons

120. “America was a nation that refused to grow up. It was a perpetual baby, a vast, pink, fleshy toddler, now in possession of some terrible weapons it did not know how to hold properly, much less use properly.”

— Dan Simmons

121. “Reading your sonnets?” asked Orphu. Mahnmut closed the book. “How’d you know? Have you taken up telepathy now that you’ve lost your eyes?” “Not yet,” rumbled the Ionian. Orphu’s great crab shell was lashed to the deck ten meters from where Mahnmut sat near the bow. “Some of your silences are more literary than others, is all.”

— Dan Simmons

122. “Movie SF is, by definition, dumbed down – there have only been three or four SF movies in the history of film that aspire to the complexity of literary SF.”

— Dan Simmons

123. “Look,” said Lamia, “what good would telling each other stories do? When we meet the Shrike, we tell it what we want, one of us is granted the wish, and the others die. Correct?”

— Dan Simmons

124. “I loved almost everything about being a teacher, but I was an unusual teacher.”

— Dan Simmons

125. “How could anyone stay sane with entire lifetimes stored in one human mind?”

— Dan Simmons

126. “I’m hungry, Raul,” she said from the head of the stairs. “Want to go down and see what this old ship’s galley can whomp up for lunch?”

— Dan Simmons

127. “Philosophical poetry by moonlight was all right, but guns that shot straight and true were a necessity.”

— Dan Simmons

128. “The strongest beings are those who sing themselves into existence.”

— Dan Simmons

129. “Dislinear plotting and noncontiguous prose have their adherents, not the least of which am I, but in the end, my friends, it is character which wins or loses immortality upon the vellum. Haven’t you ever harbored the secret thought that somewhere Huck and Jim are – at this instant – poling their raft down some river just beyond our reach, so much more real are they than the shoe clerk who fitted us just a forgotten day ago?”

— Dan Simmons

130. “Gladstone had read Weintraub’s book, The Abraham Dilemma, in which he analyzed the relationship between a God who demanded the sacrifice of a son and the human race who agreed to it. Weintraub had reasoned that the Old Testament Jehovah had not simply been testing Abraham, but had communicated in the only language of loyalty, obedience, sacrifice, and command that humankind could understand at that point in the relationship.”

— Dan Simmons

131. “Even if it all fails, it was worth the time,” Saul Laski said softly. “The powerful have received their share of the world’s attention even when their power has been shown as sheer evil. The victims 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

132. “Sacrifice and the agreement to sacrifice had written human history in blood.”

— Dan Simmons

133. “There will be no more offerings, neither child nor parent. There will be no more sacrifices. The time of obedience and atonement is past. Either help us as a friend, or go away!”

— Dan Simmons

134. “For a few minutes I stood alone in her chambers, appreciating the light and silence and art. There was a van Gogh on one of the walls, worth more than most planets could pay. It was a painting of the artist’s room at Arles. Madness is not a new invention.”

— Dan Simmons

135. “I love being a poet. It’s the goddamned words I can’t stand.”

— Dan Simmons

136. “Forcing school children to recite a national pledge doesn’t sound very American to me,” said James. “No,” agreed Holmes. “It sounds German. Very German.”

— Dan Simmons

137. “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

138. “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

139. “Dad,” said Rachel, “I’m going to ask you a question I’ve asked about a million times since I was two. Do you believe in God?” Sol had not smiled. He had no choice but to give her the answer he had given her a million times. “I’m waiting to,” he said.”

— Dan Simmons

140. “He is asking us if we can truly bear hearing the story. Losing our ignorance can be dangerous because our ignorance is a shield.”

— Dan Simmons

141. “Writing, Im convinced, should be a subversive activity – frowned on by the authorities – and not one cooed over and praised beyond common sense by some teacher.”

— Dan Simmons

142. “It’s odd how violence and humor so often go together, isn’t it?”

— Dan Simmons

143. “Poetry is only secondarily about words. Primarily, it is about truth.”

— Dan Simmons

144. “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

145. “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

146. “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

147. “Jehovah had not simply been testing Abraham, but had communicated in the only language of loyalty, obedience, sacrifice, and command that humankind could understand at that point in the relationship.”

— Dan Simmons

148. “Nothing helps an artist’s career more than a little death and obscurity.”

— Dan Simmons

149. “This is all too important.” Aenea smiled. “It’s all too important. That’s the damned problem, isn’t it?” She turned her face back to the stars.”

— Dan Simmons

150. “At that moment I would have welcomed spider-rats nibbling on my toes about as much as the idea of chatting with a missionary priest.”

— Dan Simmons