Top 400 Dan Simmons Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “Johnny-boy shook his head. Maybe he thought I wanted him to drink from the bottle. Hell, I have more class than that. There are paper cups over by the water cooler.”

— Dan Simmons

153. “And above it all the butterfly affect. The sure knowledge that the entire life of a human being is like a single day in that human’s life: unplannable, unpredictable, governed by the hidden tides of chaotic factors and buffered by butterfly wings...”

— Dan Simmons

154. “We are not the only avatars of humanity. Once our computing machines achieved self-consciousness, they became part of this design.”

— Dan Simmons

155. “Human philosophy tends to shake down into values which might be categorized as intellectual, religious, moral, and aesthetic.”

— Dan Simmons

156. “All those before us have gone into the darkness without assurance of logic or fact or persuasive theory, with only a slender thread of hope or all too shakable convention of faith. And they have been able to sustain that slim hope in the face of darkness, then so must I.”

— Dan Simmons

157. “Nothing had ever been so welcome by its absence.”

— Dan Simmons

158. “It was late morning when Kassad finished his story.”

— Dan Simmons

159. “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

160. “God is our refuge and strength, and ever-prethent help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountainth fall into the heart of the sea, though its waterth roar and foam and the mountains quake with their thurging.”

— Dan Simmons

161. “America, he thought, and not for the first time, is a nation with huge dreams and not infrequently the ability to realize them.”

— Dan Simmons

162. “Blood and brain tissue clung to the wet rock like the refuse of a sad picnic.”

— Dan Simmons

163. “Brawne looks at Johnny, realizing that she is seeing in infrared now as the heat-lamp light from distant furnaces of data suns bathes them both. He is still handsome. –.”

— Dan Simmons

164. “But he had once told Watson that the “less or fewer” issue, along with the use of “I” in such sentences as “He gave the money to Sheila and I”, inflicted on the public by people who considered themselves well-educated, could be drastically reduced in frequency – if not actually abolished – by a few well-aimed pistol shots and an explanatory note that would be pinned to the victims’ chests.”

— Dan Simmons

165. “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

166. “Later, dictating the tale into his comlog, the Consul remembered it as a seamless whole, minus the pauses, hoarse voice, false starts, and small redundancies which were the timeless failings of human speech.”

— Dan Simmons

167. “But I think, and hope, that the novels can be understood and enjoyed as science fiction, on their own terms.”

— Dan Simmons

168. “In an interstellar society where the Church ruled all but absolutely, news awaited not only independent confirmation but official permission to exist.”

— Dan Simmons

169. “Someone or something had used this path for millennia.”

— Dan Simmons

170. “Abraham came not to sacrifice, but to know once and for all whether this God was a god to be trusted and obeyed. No other test would do.”

— Dan Simmons

171. “Artists recognize other artists as soon as the pencil begins to move.”

— Dan Simmons

172. “But Siri knew the slow pace of books and the cadences of theater under the stars. I knew only the stars.”

— Dan Simmons

173. “I wish we had the technology to fight God on an equal basis. To beard him in his den. To fight back for all of the injustices heaped on humanity. To allow him to alter his smug arrogance or be blown to hell.”

— Dan Simmons

174. “As for the depiction of the Catholic church, it’s not meant to be a prediction.”

— Dan Simmons

175. “I realize now that what I was trying to do with the Armaghast data was offer the Church not a rebirth but only a transition to a false life such as these poor walking corpses inhabit. If the Church is meant to die, it must do so – but do so gloriously, in the full knowledge of its rebirth in Christ.”

— Dan Simmons

176. “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.”

— Dan Simmons

177. “There were strict laws protecting card privacy but laws had a bad habit of being ignored or abrogated when societal push came to totalitarian shove.”

— Dan Simmons

178. “Once evolution gets a good basic design, it tends to throw away the variants and concentrate on the near-infinite diversity within that design.”

— Dan Simmons

179. “Without conscious thought I stepped behind the altar, raised my arms, and began the celebration of the Eucharist. There was no sense of parody or melodrama in this act, no symbolism or hidden intention; it was merely the automatic reaction of a priest who had said Mass almost daily for more than forty-six years of his life and who now faced the prospect of never again participating in the reassuring ritual of that celebration. It.”

— Dan Simmons

180. “There is something about raising a child that helps to sharpen one’s sense of what is real.”

— Dan Simmons

181. “Crawford reacted in the fashion of small towns immemorial – some tongues wagged constantly, some people could not keep the pity and pleasure at someone else’s misfortune out of their voices and gazes – but mostly the community folded its protective wings around the Weintraub family like an awkward mother bird shielding its young.”

— Dan Simmons

182. “Have you always used a pen?” “No,” I said, “only when I want to write something worth reading.”

— Dan Simmons

183. “Sol looked up as a dozen pinpoints of fierce light expanded into ripples and shock waves of plasma explosions far out in space. “I wish we had the technology to fight God on an equal basis,” he said in low, tight tones. “To beard him in his den. To fight back for all of the injustices heaped on humanity. To allow him to alter his smug arrogance or be blown to hell.”

— Dan Simmons

184. “Ah,” grinned Old Sludge, showing his one tooth, “going to the company store to get some algae chewies, huh?” “Goddamn poopoo,” I would grin back at him.”

— Dan Simmons

185. “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

186. “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. 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

187. “My days were but heartbeats to you. I hated you for that.”

— Dan Simmons

188. “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

189. “Clemens laughed until he began coughing again. “Don’t you see, James?” he said at last. “You and I are only minor characters in this story about the Great Detective. Our little lives and endings mean nothing to the God-Writer, whoever the sonofabitch might be.”

— Dan Simmons

190. “As long as my sixth graders showed an average improvement of five years, the principal and district pretty much left me alone to create my own curriculum and teach whatever I wanted.”

— Dan Simmons

191. “Doing a life study while drunk and in the process of being seduced is never a formula for quality art.”

— Dan Simmons

192. “So many important things pass quickly without being understood at the time. So many powerful moments are buried beneath the absurd.”

— Dan Simmons

193. “Lovemaking seems all too absurd when described.”

— Dan Simmons

194. “Children bring chaos and clutter and an infinite potential for the future.”

— Dan Simmons

195. “I hope that on the morning of my forty-ninth birthday, in Hemingway’s last moments, he might have been thinking, if his sorrow and depression allowed him such a luxury as coherent thought, not only of his final, decisive, twelve-gauge gesture of ultimate defiance but also of any victories he had won in his long-running war against invisible enemies.”

— Dan Simmons

196. “What, after all, is more real to us than the geography of our childhoods?”

— Dan Simmons

197. “Their three approaches fail but somehow the story itself succeeds, despite its narrator’s and even author’s failures!”

— Dan Simmons

198. “There has to be more than this,” I said. The doctor looked up from his grim work with a bemused smile. “Is there?” he said. “Please show me.” He lifted the man’s heart and seemed to weigh it in one hand.”

— Dan Simmons

199. “Be assured, I do not suffer from a sense of humor.”

— Dan Simmons

200. “Hell is also the memory of starving children in the slums of Armaghast and the smile of politicians sending boys off to die in colonial wars.”

— Dan Simmons