Top 400 Dan Simmons Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “Every time I believe I know one of these men or officers, I find that I am wrong. A million years of Man’s Medicinal progress will never reveal the secret condition and sealed compartments of the Human soul.”

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

303. “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

304. “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

305. “A mob is a brainless thing.”

— Dan Simmons

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

310. “Brother turned the page and read aloud again without once glancing down at the text.”

— Dan Simmons

311. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

313. “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

314. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

316. “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

317. “All humans feed on violence, on the small exercises of power over another, but few have tasted – as we have – the ultimate power.”

— Dan Simmons

318. “Only humankind struggles and fails in becoming what it is. The reasons are many and complex, but all stem from the fact that we have evolved as one of the self-seeing organs of the evolving universe. Can the eye see itself?”

— Dan Simmons

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

323. “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

324. “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

325. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

327. “Siri, am I doing the right thing?”

— Dan Simmons

328. “I speculated, not for the first time, that the sanity of the nation would be much improved if children and adults were required by law to eat in separate public establishments.”

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

331. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

333. “The Consul dozed, snapping awake each time with a sense of falling, hands gripping the edge of the rigid hawking mat. He realized that he should have tied himself in with the single rope he had brought in his bag, but he didn’t want to land – the.”

— Dan Simmons

334. “This is why we Hunt, woman. Look at yourself in the mirror! Do you want to die an old woman just because you’re tired of using them? Acch!” Willi stood and turned his back on us.”

— Dan Simmons

335. “Trusting in Theo – quiet, efficient Theo – to get him through the morning. Trusting in luck to get him through the day. Trusting in the drinking at Cicero’s to get him through the night. Trusting in the unimportance of his posting to get him through life.”

— Dan Simmons

336. “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

337. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

339. “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

340. “At first the shifts in gravity from room to room were disturbing, but I soon adapted, subconsciously bracing myself for the drag of Lusus and Hebron and Sol Draconi Septem, unconsciously anticipating the less than l-standard-g freedom of the majority of the rooms. In.”

— Dan Simmons

341. “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

342. “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

343. “I was familiar with the company of men: too familiar, I might have said then, for the elements I sensed in this room – bluster, braggadocio, and the sweat-scented ointment of city-nervous men in the throes of adventure-bound male bonding – had long since grown tiresome to me.”

— Dan Simmons

344. “He enjoyed the soft sound of night wind and the knowledge that he was the only boy – perhaps the only human being – out there in the dark on the windy, frozen-grass meadows on this night that smelled of coming snow, alienated from the lighted windows and the warm hearths, very aware that he was of the village but not part of it at that moment. It was a thrilling, almost erotic feeling – an illicit discovery of self separated from everyone and everything else in the cold and dark.”

— Dan Simmons

345. “Finally, Weintraub had dealt with refusing all sacrifice, refusing any relationship with God except one of mutual respect and honest attempts at mutual understanding. He wrote about the multiple deaths of God and the need for a divine resurrection now that humankind had constructed its own gods and released them on the universe.”

— Dan Simmons

346. “Nothing could be done about it – every human above the lowest Dregs’ Hive poverty class had a comlog with biomonitor, many had implants, and each of these was tuned to the music of the datasphere, monitored by elements of the datasphere, dependent upon functions of the datasphere – so humans accepted their lack of privacy.”

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

349. “And what was our DNA designed to do for the first few hundred million years, my son? Eat? Kill? Procreate? Were we any less ignoble in our beginnings than the pre-Hegira silicon and DNA-based AIs? As Teilhard would have it, it is consciousness which God has created to accelerate the universe’s self-awareness as a means to understanding His will.”

— Dan Simmons

350. “A Million years of Man’s Medicinal Progress will never reveal the secret Condition and sealed Compartments of the Human Soul.”

— Dan Simmons