Top 400 Dan Simmons Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

305. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

317. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

323. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

325. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

332. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

334. “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

335. “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

336. “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

337. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

339. “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

340. “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

341. “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

342. “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

343. “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

344. “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

345. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

348. “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

349. “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

350. “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