Top 400 Dan Simmons Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 5 of 9

201. “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

202. “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

203. “Alone with the Morlocks, thought Silenus. But not even Morlocks for company in the end. Only my muse. There.”

— Dan Simmons

204. “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

205. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

207. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

209. “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

210. “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

211. “I knew him, Horatio,” said the drunken poet. “A man of infinite jest. Not one of them funny. A real horse’s ass, Horatio.”

— Dan Simmons

212. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

214. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

216. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

218. “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

219. “Colonel Kassad returns to the fire and slides the night visor up onto the top of his helmet. Kassad is wearing full combat gear, and the activated chameleon polymer shows only his face, floating two meters above the ground. “Nothing,” he says. “No movement. No heat traces. No sound besides the wind.” Kassad leans the FORCE multipurpose assault rifle against a rock and sits near the others, the fibers of his impact armor deactivating into a matte black not much more visible than before.”

— Dan Simmons

220. “Goodsir rolled the corpse over while Fitzjames removed his jacket and beat out the flames rising from the dead man’s face and hair. Harry Goodsir felt as if he were watching all this from a great distance. The professional part of his mind noticed with cool detachment that the furnace, as poorly banked as the low coal flames had been, had melted the man’s eyes, burned away his nose and ears, and turned his face into the texture of an overbaked, bubbling raspberry flan.”

— Dan Simmons

221. “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

222. “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

223. “Red and blue shadows stretched across the amber lawn toward us. “Keats,” I said.”

— Dan Simmons

224. “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

225. “I have a friend,” said Baedecker, “who said that there might be places of power. She thinks we could do worse than to spend our lives searching for them. What do you think?”

— Dan Simmons

226. “How they must have thought their efforts and adventures over, only to have to pick up their burdens again. How often, I realized now as an adult in my standard thirties, how often that is the case in all of our lives.”

— Dan Simmons

227. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

229. “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

230. “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

231. “Consul immediately recognized the setting as.”

— Dan Simmons

232. “A mob is a brainless thing.”

— Dan Simmons

233. “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

234. “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

235. “You’re disgusting,” said Brawne Lamia. “Ah, darling,” smiled Silenus, “those are the same words you whispered last night after your second orgasm.”

— Dan Simmons

236. “Above me, far out from the cliff, a wide-winged Thomas Hawk circles above the lagoon on rising thermals and scans the shifting bluekelp beds with its infrared vision, seeking out harp seals or torpids. Nature is stupid, I think and sit in the soft grass.”

— Dan Simmons

237. “Even in the still shadowed places, glowbirds nestled like Japanese lanterns above lighted walkways, glowing swingvines, and illuminated hanging bridges, while fireflies from Old Earth and radiant gossamers from Maui-Covenant blinked and coded their way through labyrinths of leaves, mixing with constellations sufficiently to fool even the most starwise traveler.”

— Dan Simmons

238. “I had been fasting all day and I confess with shame that I began to salivate when the air filled with the rich, frying-fat odor of burned flesh.”

— 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. “In the end, it is all we are, these limpid tide pools of self-consciousness between crashing waves of pain.”

— Dan Simmons

241. “During this time I quit attending classes at the university, and my grades rose from four Fs to three Bs and an A.”

— Dan Simmons

242. “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

243. “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

244. “Outside the port, the slashed rock of the unnamed asteroid tumbled and spun in dynamics known only to the gods of chaos mathematics.”

— Dan Simmons

245. “We lived in Boston, in an apartment where even the rats had to walk stoop-shouldered.”

— Dan Simmons

246. “We thought we were special, opening our perceptions, honing our empathy, spilling that cauldron of shared pain onto the dance floor of language and then trying to make a minuet out of all that chaotic hurt.”

— Dan Simmons

247. “I did not know if androids could dream –.”

— Dan Simmons

248. “The voice, sounding more than ever to Sol like some cut-rate holie director’s shallow idea of what God’s voice should sound like, came again: “Sol! You must listen well. The future of humankind depends upon your obedience in this matter. You must take your daughter, your daughter Rachel whom you love, and go to the world called Hyperion and offer her there as a burnt offering at one of the places of which I shall tell you.” And.”

— Dan Simmons

249. “He had always distrusted people who asked to speak freely or who vowed to speak candidly or who used the expression “frankly.”

— Dan Simmons

250. “Sometimes I think that remembering too much history is like alcohol or heroin – an addiction that seems to give meaning to your life but just wears you down and destroys you in the end.”

— Dan Simmons