Top 400 Dan Simmons Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

259. “If a man in a smoking jacket in a coal-fire-heated library in his manor house in London can understand that life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, then how can it be denied by a man pulling a sledge stacked with frozen meat and furs across an unnamed island, through the Arctic night under a sky gone mad, towards a frozen sea a thousand miles and more from any civilised hearth?”

— Dan Simmons

260. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

262. “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

263. “The beauty of being dead, he knows now, is that there is no pain and no sense of self.”

— Dan Simmons

264. “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

265. “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

266. “Every fatline receiver in the Web, Outback, galaxy, and universe would monitor the squirt, but only the Consul’s ship could decode it. Or so she hoped. The.”

— Dan Simmons

267. “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

268. “Consul immediately recognized the setting as.”

— Dan Simmons

269. “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

270. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

273. “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

274. “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

275. “I nodded, understanding nothing.”

— Dan Simmons

276. “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

277. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

279. “I think we underestimate how much of our own lives we devote to trying to meet the expectations of the dead,” continued Dave. “We don’t even think about it, we just do.”

— Dan Simmons

280. “But they were beautiful. When they died, rippling in rainbow colors, their many-hued messages unseen, unheard by their fleeing herdmates, the beauty of their death agony was beyond words. We sold their photoreceptive skins to Web corporations, their flesh to worlds like Heaven’s Gate, and ground their bones to powder to sell as aphrodisiacs to the impotent and superstitious on a score of other colony worlds. On.”

— Dan Simmons

281. “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

282. “If you are reading this, you are almost certainly reading it for the wrong reason. But as with so many things in our lives, the reason for doing something is not the important thing. It is the fact of doing that remains. Only the immutable facts that I have written this and you are reading it remain important in the end.”

— Dan Simmons

283. “And it was one of these observers who designed the tests and simulations carried out on Old Earth during the last three centuries of its exile in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud to better explain our species to them and measure the empathy of which we are capable.”

— Dan Simmons

284. “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

285. “Dust and powdered plaster hung in the air like incense, outlining two shafts of sunlight streaming down from narrow windows high above.”

— Dan Simmons

286. “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

287. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

289. “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

290. “The firstdown team for this planet must have had a fixation on animals. Horse, Bear, Eagle. For three days we were creeping down the east coast of Equus over an irregular coastline called the Mane. We’ve spent the last day making the crossing of a short span of the Middle Sea to a large island called Cat Key. Today we are offloading passengers and freight at Felix, the “major city” of the island.”

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

292. “We all want to leave monuments.”

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

294. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

296. “Writers were among my acquaintances but, as in all times, we tended to mistrust and badmouth each other, secretly resenting the others’ successes and finding fault in their work. Each of us knew in his or her heart that he or she was a true artist of the word who merely happened to be commercial; the others were hacks.”

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

298. “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

299. “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

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

— Dan Simmons