Top 400 Dan Simmons Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “Their three approaches fail but somehow the story itself succeeds, despite its narrator’s and even author’s failures!”

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

204. “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

205. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

207. “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

208. “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

209. “Marvelous melodrama,” laughed Silenus. “A real-life, Christ-weeping Sargasso of Souls and we’re for it. Who orchestrates this shitpot of a plot, anyway?”

— Dan Simmons

210. “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

211. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

213. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

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

— 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. “I came out mostly at night, moving through the ruins like a furtive shadow, sometimes gazing at my lighted palace tower like David Hume peering in his own windows and solemnly deciding that he wasn’t home.”

— Dan Simmons

218. “The Shrike did not disappear in its usual manner, did not cease being there to suddenly be here. Instead, it crouched and opened its arms wider. Its fingerblades caught the light of the violent sky. The Shrike’s metal teeth glistened in what might have been a smile.”

— Dan Simmons

219. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

221. “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

222. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

224. “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

225. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

227. “I care,” the Consul says tiredly. “If the Ousters break through, they may destroy Hyperion before we find the Shrike.” Silenus laughs derisively. “Oh, that would be terrible, wouldn’t it? To die before we discover death? To be killed before we are scheduled to be killed? To go out swiftly and without pain, rather than to writhe forever on the Shrike’s thorns? Oh, terrible thought, that.”

— Dan Simmons

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

232. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

234. “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

235. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

237. “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

238. “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

239. “I wasn’t talking about the weather,” said Abe. “Although it’s the hottest, most humid, most miserable goddamn hellhole I’ve ever been in. Worse than Burma in ’43. Worse than Singapore in typhoon weather. Jesus, it’s worse than Washington in August.”

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

241. “Kale pe a,” repeated my friend. “It is an ancient Tibetan farewell when a caravan sets out to climb the high peaks. It means – go slowly if you wish to return.” And.”

— Dan Simmons

242. “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

243. “If one is to steal, steal from the forgotten masters.” The.”

— Dan Simmons

244. “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

245. “Despite our fatal addiction to the toys granted us by our own creations.”

— Dan Simmons

246. “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

247. “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

248. “It isn’t hard being a hack writer. Between Dying Earth II and Dying Earth IX, six standard years had passed relatively painlessly. My research was meager, my plots formulaic, my characters cardboard, my prose preliterate, and my free time was my own.”

— Dan Simmons

249. “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

250. “Thomas Blanky wondered if he had been an instrument of evil – or perhaps just of folly – when he had used his more than three decades of ice-master skills to get 126 men the impossible 250 miles through ice to this place where all they could do was die.”

— Dan Simmons