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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

107. “Hobbes’s Leviathan. Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

— Dan Simmons

108. “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

109. “People always pay a lot of money for things that make them stupid.”

— Dan Simmons

110. “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

111. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

136. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

138. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

140. “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

141. “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

142. “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

143. “This is some sort of joke, isn’t it?” asks Hunt, staring at the flawless blue sky and distant fields. I cough as lightly and briefly as possible into a handkerchief I have made from a towel borrowed from the inn. “Probably,” I say. “But then, what isn’t?”

— Dan Simmons

144. “I have often been called insane by those who underestimate the power of poetry.”

— Dan Simmons

145. “I knew that I wanted to be a writer even before I knew exactly what being a writer entailed.”

— Dan Simmons

146. “I love life, Eleanor. It is that simple. Had I the choice, I would live forever, accepting pain and loss as my due and learning – across time – even to appreciate the sharp seasoning of this sadness.”

— 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. “Anything is better than this penny-dreadful tale I’ve found myself in.”

— 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