Top 400 Dan Simmons Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Are we all illusions? Brief shadows thrown on a white wall for the shallow amusement of bored gods? Is this all?”

— Dan Simmons

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

257. “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

258. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

260. “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

261. “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

262. “Consul immediately recognized the setting as.”

— Dan Simmons

263. “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

264. “A mob is a brainless thing.”

— Dan Simmons

265. “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

266. “Don’t go, Bobby,” said my friend. “It’s not worth it.”

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

268. “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

269. “Sarai gripped his hand. “Do you think you’re the only one who has had the dream?” “Dream?” managed Sol. She.”

— Dan Simmons

270. “I had long since learned that to read about the follies and scandals of the world was to desecrate the morning.”

— Dan Simmons

271. “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

272. “For some reason it’s as difficult, perhaps more difficult, this time. Dying should become easier with practice.”

— Dan Simmons

273. “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

274. “I nodded, understanding nothing.”

— Dan Simmons

275. “It will make sense when it comes about. All improbabilities do when probability waves collapse into event.”

— Dan Simmons

276. “The Consul gripped the edges of the mat with fingers gone white. He had tied the strap of his duffel bag around his belt, otherwise the bag would have tumbled off to a glacier far below.”

— Dan Simmons

277. “You’ve had your chance, Richard. Scott’s a big boy now, and if he wants to spend a few years chanting mantras and giving away his lunch money to some bearded horse’s ass with a Jehovah Complex, well, you’ve had your chance to help him, so what do you say you just get on with your screwed-up life, Richard E. Baedecker.”

— Dan Simmons

278. “It just makes me so goddamn mad,” she said, still looking away from Saul. “Yes.” “I mean, it’s like he didn’t even count. He wasn’t important. Do you know what I mean?”

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

280. “Dale stepped over to the large console radio and wrestled it away from the wall. The inside was empty. No wires, no tubes, no lights for the dial, no works at all. Dale looked at the interiors of the other radios he’d listened to over the past two months. All empty.”

— Dan Simmons

281. “I had forgotten that monsters do not die. They must be killed.”

— Dan Simmons

282. “Soon she would have to wake, tend the fire, serve the men, care for the younger children, and face the end of a childhood she had barely known. Soon she would become the property of a man other than her father, and on that day she would receive the traditional Hindu blessing – “May you have eight sons.”

— Dan Simmons

283. “The only thing that had changed was that the bills were bigger.”

— Dan Simmons

284. “The Church might have died before this revelation could have brought new life to it. But.”

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

286. “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

287. “Being eaten by a kraken less than a hundred kilometers from Conamara Chaos Central would be embarrassing.”

— Dan Simmons

288. “Human thought can be described as a standing wavefront. Sort of a superhologram. Or, maybe more precisely, a hologram containing a few million smaller holograms.”

— Dan Simmons

289. “To call this conveyance a “passenger dirigible” is an exercise in creative semantics. It is a huge lifting device with cargo holds large enough to carry the town of Felix out to sea and still have room for thousands of bales of fiberplastic. Meanwhile, the less important cargo – we passengers – make do where we can.”

— Dan Simmons

290. “You might already be able to tell that I was born with a silver spoon up my ass. I offer no apologies.”

— Dan Simmons

291. “Do you believe in God?” Sol had not smiled. He had no choice but to give her the answer he had given her a million times. “I’m waiting to,” he said.”

— Dan Simmons

292. “No lifetime is long enough for those who wish to create, Raul. Or for those who simply wish to understand themselves and their lives.”

— Dan Simmons

293. “The support and covering craft in orbit were also decimated, sir.’ ‘Decimated?’ The pain is making de Soya angry. ‘That means one in ten, Captain. Are ten percent of ship’s personnel on the casualty list?’ ‘No, sir,’ says Lempriere, ’more like sixty percent.”

— Dan Simmons

294. “The steward had been more circumspect after that. He had learned – as Odysseus had learned after a certain number of years of his wanderings – that his guile was no match for the world and that hubris would always be punished by the gods.”

— Dan Simmons

295. “Brawne set her hand on the thing’s broad chest and pushed. The.”

— Dan Simmons

296. “But, in the end, it was none of these things, of course. It was only Hrothgar’s claustrophobic mead hall with the monster waiting in the darkness without. We had our Grendel, to be sure. We even had our Hrothgar if one squints a bit at sad King Billy’s poor slouched profile.”

— Dan Simmons

297. “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

298. “Religion seems to have always offered us that false duality,” she said, setting her cup of tea on a flat stone. “The silences of infinite space or the cozy comfort of inner certainty.”

— Dan Simmons

299. “Not merely to preserve a few species from Old Earth, but to find unity in diversity. To spread the seed of humankind to all worlds, diverse environments, while treating as sacred the diversity of life we find elsewhere.”

— Dan Simmons

300. “He hated it when she had too much to drink and tried to hide it, acting the perfect lady – but Harlen could always tell by the precise diction, the slow movements, and the way she got all sloppy and tried to hug him.”

— Dan Simmons