Top 400 Dan Simmons Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “In an age of superchargers, turbochargers, and every other prosthetic breathing aid, this was a normally aspirated V-6 that derived speed from perfection.”

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

253. “How I yearn to throw myself into endless space,” said Maggie, “and float above the awful abyss.” Both Baedecker and Gavin turned to stare at her. “Goethe,” she said as if in self-defense.”

— 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. “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

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

263. “Consul immediately recognized the setting as.”

— Dan Simmons

264. “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

265. “A mob is a brainless thing.”

— Dan Simmons

266. “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

267. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

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

— 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. “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

272. “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

273. “Kale pe a,” repeated my friend. “It is an ancient Tibetan farewell when a caravan sets out to climb the high peaks. It means – go slowly if you wish to return.” And.”

— Dan Simmons

274. “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

275. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

277. “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

278. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

280. “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

281. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

283. “He felt the scrotum-lifting tension he always experienced when he was an obvious target.”

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

289. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

291. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

293. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

295. “The Shrike pilgrims were subdued, as if still contemplating Colonel Kassad’s grim and confusing tale. The Consul had been drinking steadily since before midday and now he felt the pleasant displacement – from reality, from the pain of memory – which allowed him to get through each day and night. Now he asked, his voice as careful and unslurred as only a true alcoholic’s can be, whose turn it was to tell a tale.”

— Dan Simmons

296. “There is the sudden sound of pennants stirring on their staffs as the wind comes up.”

— Dan Simmons

297. “I don’t know,” says Hunt. “That doesn’t sound like something a poet whose reputation has lasted a thousand years would have written.”

— Dan Simmons

298. “I was always waiting for you, she sent.”

— Dan Simmons

299. “Now he asked, his voice as careful and unslurred as only a true alcoholic’s can be, whose turn it was to tell a tale.”

— Dan Simmons

300. “I did not truly know M. Masteen,” said the priest. “We were not of the same faith. But we were of the same profession; Voice of the Tree Masteen spent much of his life doing what he understood to be God’s work, pursuing God’s will in the writings of the Muir and the beauties of nature. His was the true faith – tested by difficulties, tempered by obedience, and, in the end, sealed by sacrifice.” Dur.”

— Dan Simmons