Top 400 Dan Simmons Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “In the end, it is all we are, these limpid tide pools of self-consciousness between crashing waves of pain.”

— Dan Simmons

252. “But I bet it’s more complicated than that. There’re places of power – yeah – no doubt about that. But it’s like we were talking about last night. You have to help make them. You have to be in the right place at the right time and know it.” “How do you know it?” asked Baedecker. “By dreaming about it but not thinking about it,” Dave said.”

— Dan Simmons

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

257. “Consul immediately recognized the setting as.”

— Dan Simmons

258. “Mark Twain once opined in his homey way: “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.” He was droll but incomplete. During those long months of beginning my Cantos on Heaven’s Gate, I discovered that the difference between finding the right word as opposed to accepting the almost right word was the difference between being struck by lightning and merely watching a lightning display.”

— Dan Simmons

259. “This is poetry. You’re writing about Heaven’s Gate and the Caribou Herd, but what comes across is loneliness, displacement, angst, and a cynical look at humanity.”

— Dan Simmons

260. “The best lack all conviction,” he thought, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Dur.”

— Dan Simmons

261. “Great,” said Natalie, “in evolutionary terms they’re supermen. In psychological development, they’re retarded. In moral terms, they’re subhuman.”

— Dan Simmons

262. “As was the case with so many young people I encountered these days, I could not tell if the boy was truly retarded or just pitifully ill educated. Most of the population under thirty appears to fall into one or the other category.”

— Dan Simmons

263. “Are we all illusions? Brief shadows thrown on a white wall for the shallow amusement of bored gods? Is this all?”

— Dan Simmons

264. “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

265. “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

266. “I miei pensieri erano come mercurio... scivolavano sempre via, prima che potessi afferrarli o sagomarli in forma coerente.”

— Dan Simmons

267. “I despair at the rise of modern violence. I truly give in to despair at times, that deep, futureless pit of despair which Hopkins called carrion comfort.”

— Dan Simmons

268. “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

269. “Abraham was testing God. By denying the sacrifice at the last moment, by stopping the knife, God had earned the right – in Abraham’s eyes and the hearts of his offspring – to become the God of Abraham.”

— Dan Simmons

270. “For the thousandth time, I wondered if there were a way to reprogram this autonomous intelligence so that it wasn’t such a pain in the ass.”

— Dan Simmons

271. “A thin line of beard along his jawline served to accent the sharpness of his countenance as surely as blood on a knife blade.”

— Dan Simmons

272. “The road turns and starts climbing where he impacted,” said Cameron. Dar winced slightly. He hated the verb-use of nouns such as impact.”

— Dan Simmons

273. “Her eyes are open but she does not see.”

— Dan Simmons

274. “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

275. “You stay with her. I’ll follow it in.”

— Dan Simmons

276. “We all want to leave monuments.”

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

278. “I have made command decisions based upon insights which would not have seemed totally logical outside the context of my experience and training.”

— Dan Simmons

279. “I can tolerate anything, in dog or man, save for the refusal or inability to learn.”

— Dan Simmons

280. “Actually, the production values for reality – as had doubtless been the case for centuries – were much lower than for even a moderate-budget holodrama.”

— Dan Simmons

281. “We have made some progress, thought Gladstone, despite the inertia forced upon us by the Core. Despite the near-death of science. Despite our fatal addiction to the toys granted us by our own creations.”

— Dan Simmons

282. “Ah, well, thought Charlie, ours is not to wonder why, ours is but to do and die.”

— Dan Simmons

283. “Even places of power are useless unless you’re prepared to bring something to them. And I don’t mean just the things we brought – they’re to the real sacrament what the lump of bread is to the Eucharist. Then, if you come away the same person you were, you know it wasn’t really a place of power.”

— Dan Simmons

284. “We are in a comfortable Dark Ages of the inventive mind; institutions change but little, and that by gradual evolution rather than revolution; scientific research creeps crablike in a lateral shuffle, where once it leaped in great intuitive bounds; devices change even less, plateau technologies common to us would be instantly identifiable – and operable! – to our great-grandfathers.”

— Dan Simmons

285. “Yggdrasill – one of only five of its kind – into a war.”

— Dan Simmons

286. “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

287. “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

288. “Perhaps Nemes and her kind will keep it in a zoo to hunt it when they are bored.”

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

290. “I nodded, understanding nothing.”

— Dan Simmons

291. “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

292. “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

293. “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

294. “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

295. “A mob is a brainless thing.”

— Dan Simmons

296. “We have our non-organic memory to fall back on when our neural memories seem doubtful. Human beings have only that confusing mass of chemically driven neurological storage to rely on. They’re all subjective and emotion-tinged. How can they trust any of their memories?”

— Dan Simmons

297. “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

298. “In this cold, teeth can shatter after two or three hours – actually explode – sending shrapnel of bone and enamel flying inside the cavern of one’s clenched jaws.”

— Dan Simmons

299. “Silenus returns to himself in that process of allowing the world to rush in once more, much like the return of the senses following orgasm. Only the descent of the writer to the world was more painful as he or she returned, trailing clouds of glory which quickly dissipated in the mundane flow of sensory trivia.”

— Dan Simmons

300. “Is there another Life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be, we cannot be created for this sort of suffering.” Oh, Fanny, if only you knew! We are created for precisely this sort of suffering. In the end, it is all we are, these limpid tide pools of self-consciousness between crashing waves of pain.”

— Dan Simmons