Top 400 Dan Simmons Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

206. “I would have thought your Hegemony was far beyond a petroleum economy.” I laughed and locked the wheel in. “Nobody gets beyond a petroleum economy. Not while there’s petroleum there. We don’t burn it, if that’s what you mean. But it’s still essential for the production of plastics, synthetics, food base, and keroids. Two hundred billion people use a lot of plastic.” “And Maui-Covenant has oil?”

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

210. “To be a poet, I realized, a true poet, was to become the Avatar of humanity incarnate; to accept the mantle of poet is to carry the cross of the Son of Man, to suffer the birth pangs of the Soul-Mother of Humanity.”

— Dan Simmons

211. “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

212. “If love is the answer, what was the question?”

— Dan Simmons

213. “Hoyt’s view of hell is tactile; it is the pain which moves in him like jagged wires pulled through his veins and guts.”

— Dan Simmons

214. “Evolution brings human beings. Human beings, through a long and painful process, bring humanity.” “Empathy,” Aenea said softly. Father Glaucus turned his blind eyes in her direction. “Precisely, my dear.”

— Dan Simmons

215. “Admiral,” said Gladstone, “is it absolutely necessary to destroy the singularity sphere as soon as the Ousters have penetrated our cordon sanitaire? Couldn’t we wait another few minutes to judge their intentions?” “No, CEO,” answered the Admiral promptly. “The farcaster link must be destroyed as soon as they are within quick assault range.”

— Dan Simmons

216. “Tyrena did not laugh again but her smile slashed upward in a twist of green lips. “Martin, Martin, Martin,” she said, “the population of literate people has been declining steadily since Gutenberg’s day. By the twentieth century, less than two percent of the people in the so-called industrialized democracies read even one book a year. And that was before the smart machines, dataspheres, and user-friendly environments.”

— Dan Simmons

217. “Occam’s Razor: All other things being equal, the simplest solution is usually the correct one. – William of Occam, fourteenth century Darwin’s Blade: All other things being equal, the simplest solution is usually stupidity. – Darwin Minor, twenty-first century.”

— Dan Simmons

218. “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

219. “God Almighty, I love life. Even this vile place, where the trees are shattered stubs and where nothing grows but craters, even the sights, scents, sounds, and stirrings of this place are preferable to the unchanging nothingness of the Great Darkness.”

— Dan Simmons

220. “You’re upsetting a delicate balance of corruption that has existed here for centuries.”

— Dan Simmons

221. “I explored religions and serious drinking, finding more hope of lasting solace in the latter.”

— Dan Simmons

222. “He wished he were home in Charleston, listening to the Dave Brubeck Quartet on the stereo and reading Bruce Catton.”

— Dan Simmons

223. “Just as well,” he said. “We have one deus ex machina too many as it is.”

— Dan Simmons

224. “Few events in a human being’s life – at least a male human being’s life – are as free, as exuberant, as infinitely expansive and filled with potential as the first day of summer when one is an eleven-year-old boy. The summer lies ahead like a great banquet and the days are filled with rich, slow time in which to enjoy each course.”

— Dan Simmons

225. “The Zen Gnostics claim forty billion followers,” he rumbled. “But what kind of religion is that, eh? No churches. No priests. No holy books. No concept of sin.” Dur.”

— Dan Simmons

226. “He sits in the straight-backed chair next to the bed and lifts a cooling cup of tea. “If you die, what happens to me?” “I don’t know,” I say honestly. “If I die, I don’t even know what happens to me.”

— Dan Simmons

227. “Niemand hat je gesagt, dass das Universum normal ist.”

— Dan Simmons

228. “One of my favorite things was from the Tattireeya Upanishads. It goes – ‘I am this world, and I eat this world. Who knows this, knows.”

— Dan Simmons

229. “I’d already come to realize that the monologue was his favorite form of conversation.”

— Dan Simmons

230. “How I yearn to throw myself into endless space,” said Maggie, “and float above the awful abyss.”

— Dan Simmons

231. “He felt the scrotum-lifting tension he always experienced when he was an obvious target.”

— Dan Simmons

232. “You said seventy million were planned,” I said. “Yeah, well, we changed our minds after Transline’s resident AI read it.” I slumped lower in the flowfoam. “Even the AI hated it?” “The AI loved it,” said Tyrena. “That’s when we knew for sure that people were going to hate it.”

— Dan Simmons

233. “If I should die,” said I to myself, “I have left no immortal work behind me – nothing to make my friends proud of my memory – but 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

234. “It occurs to me that the Grendel tale is premature. The players have not been brought upon the stage. 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.”

— Dan Simmons

235. “IF OUR SOCIETY ever opted for Orwell’s Big Brother approach, the instrument of choice for oppression would have to be the credit wake. In a totally noncash economy with only a vestigial barter black market, a person’s activities could be tracked in real time by monitoring the credit wake of his or her universal card. 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

236. “When I glanced back up, a holoed globe of Hyperion ceased spinning and unwound itself into a series of flattened projections: oblique equirectangular, Bonne, orthographic, rosette, Van der Grinten, Gores, interrupted Goode homolosine, gnomonic, sinusoidal, azimuthal equidistant, polyconic, hypercorrected Kuwatsi, computer-eschered, Briesemeister, Buckminster, Miller cylindrical, multicoligraphed, and satplot standard, before resolving into a standard Robinson-Baird map of Hyperion.”

— Dan Simmons

237. “Shrike is the Lord of Pain and the Angel of Final Atonement, come from a place beyond time to announce the end of the human race.”

— Dan Simmons

238. “Religion and ethics were not always – or even frequently – mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often deflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice.”

— Dan Simmons

239. “Planck time and Planck length,” I said. “I don’t remember exactly – something about combining the three fundamental constants of physics – gravity, Planck’s constant, and the speed of light. I remember it gave some tiny little units of length and time.”

— Dan Simmons

240. “Human philosophy tends to shake down into values which might be categorized as intellectual, religious, moral, and aesthetic. Ummon and the Stables recognize only one value – existence. 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

241. “She does speak Bengali, doesn’t she?” Morrow had asked over the phone. “Sure,” I’d said. Actually, Amrita spoke Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, and a little Punjabi as well as German, Russian, and English, but not Bengali.”

— Dan Simmons

242. “In the end, thought Sol, past logic and hope, it is dreams and the love of those dearest to us that form Abraham’s answer to God.”

— Dan Simmons

243. “This was, without a doubt, the cruciform of which the Bikura spoke. And it had been set here a minimum of many thousands of years ago – perhaps tens of thousands – long before mankind first left Old Earth. Almost certainly before Christ taught in Galilee. I.”

— Dan Simmons

244. “The Shrike pilgrims were subdued, as if still contemplating Colonel Kassad’s grim and confusing tale. The Consul had been drinking steadily since before midday and now he felt the pleasant displacement – from reality, from the pain of memory – which allowed him to get through each day and night. Now he asked, his voice as careful and unslurred as only a true alcoholic’s can be, whose turn it was to tell a tale.”

— Dan Simmons

245. “I did not forget that there was a panic button. The problem is simple – when there is real panic, one does not immediately think of buttons. The.”

— Dan Simmons

246. “Of course it’s all a game. All of the good and hard and even bad things in life are just a game.”

— Dan Simmons

247. “Or the king could die. Or the horse could die. Or he could teach the horse how to talk.”

— Dan Simmons

248. “The Shrike Temple had used androids extensively, complying with the Church of the Shrike doctrine which proclaimed that androids were free from original sin, therefore spiritually superior to humankind and – incidentally – exempt from the Shrike’s terrible and inevitable retribution.”

— Dan Simmons

249. “The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. I.”

— Dan Simmons

250. “The Final Days are here, priest. The prophecies given to us by the Avatar centuries ago are unfolding before our eyes. What you call riots are the first death throes of a society which deserves to die. The Days of Atonement are upon us and the Lord of Pain soon will walk among us.”

— Dan Simmons