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

302. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

304. “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

305. “Later, the millions of shocked and displaced vacation-home owners were put to work dismantling the thousands of oil derricks and tourist centers which had spotted the Equatorial Archipelago like pox.”

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

307. “La suma del cociente intelectual de la multitud estaba muy por debajo de la de su integrante mas cretino. Las turbas tienen pasiones, no cerebro.”

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

312. “A mob is a brainless thing.”

— Dan Simmons

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

319. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

321. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

323. “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

324. “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

325. “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

326. “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

327. “Despite the near-death of science. Despite our fatal addiction to the toys granted us by our own creations.”

— Dan Simmons

328. “To lose all this forever is the essence of being human, my love.”

— Dan Simmons

329. “You realize that everything you hear and see in this conference is highly classified?” I did not treat the statement as a question.”

— Dan Simmons

330. “People scream and run for coyer.”

— Dan Simmons

331. “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

332. “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

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

339. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

344. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

348. “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

349. “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

350. “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