Top 400 Dan Simmons Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Be assured, I do not suffer from a sense of humor.”

— Dan Simmons

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

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. “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

207. “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

208. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

210. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

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

— 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. “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

218. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

220. “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

221. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

223. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

225. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

227. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

229. “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

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

234. “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

235. “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

236. “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

237. “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

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. “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

240. “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

241. “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

242. “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

243. “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

244. “Sol had spent his life willing the return of things unreturnable. He remembered the day he had come upon Sarai folding Rachel’s toddler clothes and setting them in a box in the attic, and he recalled her tears and his own sense of loss for the child they still had but who was lost to them through the simple arrow of time. Sol.”

— Dan Simmons

245. “Later, the millions of shocked and displaced vacation-home owners were put to work dismantling the thousands of oil derricks and tourist centers which had spotted the Equatorial Archipelago like pox.”

— Dan Simmons

246. “The poem celebrated love and loyalty but teetered on the brink of nihilism with its constant thread of corruption through love of power, human ambition and intellectual.”

— Dan Simmons

247. “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

248. “You had a corollary to Occam’s Razor,” persisted Syd. “I think it went – ‘All other things being equal, the simplest solution is usually stupidity.”

— Dan Simmons

249. “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

250. “It suddenly occurred to Baedecker that small towns in America were saner than cities because they were allowed to sleep.”

— Dan Simmons