Top 400 Dan Simmons Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “In an age where no information was inaccessible, no travel denied, such exclusion was maddening and tantalizing.”

— Dan Simmons

302. “For years I have carried on silent conversations with Siri, framing questions to myself for future discussion with her, and it suddenly strikes me with cold clarity that we will never again sit together and talk. An emptiness begins to grow inside me. Should.”

— Dan Simmons

303. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

305. “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.”

— Dan Simmons

306. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

308. “I am merely a poet dying far from home.”

— Dan Simmons

309. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.”

— Dan Simmons

310. “Crozier hurts to the cavity in the center of his self where he is sure his soul had resided until it floated away on a sea of whiskey over the decades.”

— Dan Simmons

311. “The whiskey never seemed to compromise the man’s competence.”

— Dan Simmons

312. “Richard,” said Dave, “do you ever wonder how much of your life you’ve spent trying to please the dead?”

— Dan Simmons

313. “M. Executive, I have explained the variables that require an alteration in our battle plan. Shall I begin this briefing again?”

— Dan Simmons

314. “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

315. “Theoretically, I knew, Sholokov’s design for the hawking mat allowed it to fly vertically, the incipient containment field keeping the passenger – theoretically, his beloved niece – from tumbling off backward.”

— Dan Simmons

316. “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

317. “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

318. “And then you’ll do what I say? “Yes.” “Take us where I’ll tell you to?” “Yes.” “No hidden overrides?” “None that I know of.”

— Dan Simmons

319. “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

320. “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

321. “Silenus’s true age might be anywhere from ninety to a hundred and fifty standard years. If he were close to the latter age, the Consul knew, the odds were that the poet was quite mad. As.”

— Dan Simmons

322. “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

323. “Just as well,” he said. “We have one deus ex machina too many as it is.”

— Dan Simmons

324. “IT IS NECESSARY wrote Silenus’s own hand against the unyielding cold of the Shrike’s chest. Blood dripped on.”

— Dan Simmons

325. “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

326. “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

327. “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

328. “But who the hell cares if the flowers bloom if no one is around to see them, to smell them?”

— Dan Simmons

329. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

331. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

333. “People scream and run for coyer.”

— Dan Simmons

334. “I teach him how to pair such technique with masculine or feminine caesura, or the joys of alternating iambic foot with unstressed pyrrhic, or the self-indulgence of the frequent spondee. I.”

— Dan Simmons

335. “I’m a childish fellow,” responded Silenus with his satyr’s smile. “Ambassador” – he nodded toward the Consul – “could I borrow that gilded pillow you’re wearing for a hat?” The.”

— Dan Simmons

336. “The surge became a roaring, shouting, screaming mass of rioters; at that moment, the sum of the crowd’s IQ was far below that of its most modest single member. Mobs have passions, not brains.”

— Dan Simmons

337. “You’ll have to ask him in the next life,” said Sol tiredly. “He’s dead.”

— Dan Simmons

338. “He wasn’t interested in asking questions, only in finding answers.” “What’s the difference?” asked Baedecker. He felt the conversation slipping out of his control, dropping away from him like an aircraft that had reached stall speed. “The difference is that Scott took the line of least resistance,” said Maggie. “Like most people, he found it too uncomfortable to be out in the open, unsheltered by some shadow of authority. So when the questions got too hard, he settled for easy answers.”

— Dan Simmons

339. “Remember, the economy wasn’t really global then, and it depended upon private money institutions called banks, gold reserves, and the value of physical money – actual coins and pieces of paper that were supposed to be worth something. It was all a consensual hallucination, of course, and in the 1930s, the hallucination turned nightmare.”

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

341. “It dealt with the Olympian struggle which followed the Titans’ refusal to be displaced – the boiling of great seas as Oceanus struggled with Neptune, his usurper, the extinction of suns as Hyperion struggled with Apollo for control of the light, and the trembling of the universe itself as Saturn struggled with Jupiter for control of the throne of the gods.”

— Dan Simmons

342. “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

343. “Odd how many suffering members of humankind have faced eternity obsessed with their bowels, their bedsores, or the meagerness of their diets.”

— Dan Simmons

344. “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

345. “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

346. “Call me Mort, Sol.”

— Dan Simmons

347. “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

348. “IF OUR SOCIETY ever opted for Orwell’s Big Brother approach, the instrument of choice for oppression would have to be the credit wake. In a totally noncash economy with only a vestigial barter black market, a person’s activities could be tracked in real time by monitoring the credit wake of his or her universal card. There were strict laws protecting card privacy but laws had a bad habit of being ignored or abrogated when societal push came to totalitarian shove.”

— Dan Simmons

349. “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

350. “Strange,” said Natalie. “What?” “Two gunshot wounds, pneumonia, a concussion, three broken ribs, and enough cuts and bruises to keep a football team happy for a full season.” “Jews are hard to kill.”

— Dan Simmons