Top 400 Dan Simmons Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “If a man in a smoking jacket in a coal-fire-heated library in his manor house in London can understand that life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, then how can it be denied by a man pulling a sledge stacked with frozen meat and furs across an unnamed island, through the Arctic night under a sky gone mad, towards a frozen sea a thousand miles and more from any civilised hearth?”

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

353. “In the end, thought Sol, past logic and hope, it is dreams and the love of those dearest to us that form Abraham’s answer to God.”

— Dan Simmons

354. “I nodded, understanding nothing.”

— Dan Simmons

355. “You said seventy million were planned,” I said. “Yeah, well, we changed our minds after Transline’s resident AI read it.” I slumped lower in the flowfoam. “Even the AI hated it?” “The AI loved it,” said Tyrena. “That’s when we knew for sure that people were going to hate it.”

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

357. “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

358. “The Consul gripped the edges of the mat with fingers gone white. He had tied the strap of his duffel bag around his belt, otherwise the bag would have tumbled off to a glacier far below.”

— Dan Simmons

359. “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

360. “It just makes me so goddamn mad,” she said, still looking away from Saul. “Yes.” “I mean, it’s like he didn’t even count. He wasn’t important. Do you know what I mean?”

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

362. “Dale stepped over to the large console radio and wrestled it away from the wall. The inside was empty. No wires, no tubes, no lights for the dial, no works at all. Dale looked at the interiors of the other radios he’d listened to over the past two months. All empty.”

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

364. “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

365. “The only thing that had changed was that the bills were bigger.”

— Dan Simmons

366. “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

367. “The Church might have died before this revelation could have brought new life to it. But.”

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

369. “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

370. “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

371. “Being eaten by a kraken less than a hundred kilometers from Conamara Chaos Central would be embarrassing.”

— Dan Simmons

372. “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

373. “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

374. “You might already be able to tell that I was born with a silver spoon up my ass. I offer no apologies.”

— Dan Simmons

375. “Do you believe in God?” Sol had not smiled. He had no choice but to give her the answer he had given her a million times. “I’m waiting to,” he said.”

— Dan Simmons

376. “No lifetime is long enough for those who wish to create, Raul. Or for those who simply wish to understand themselves and their lives.”

— Dan Simmons

377. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

380. “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

381. “The steward had been more circumspect after that. He had learned – as Odysseus had learned after a certain number of years of his wanderings – that his guile was no match for the world and that hubris would always be punished by the gods.”

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

387. “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

388. “He hated it when she had too much to drink and tried to hide it, acting the perfect lady – but Harlen could always tell by the precise diction, the slow movements, and the way she got all sloppy and tried to hug him.”

— Dan Simmons

389. “I can tolerate anything, in dog or man, save for the refusal or inability to learn.”

— Dan Simmons

390. “Occam’s Razor: All other things being equal, the simplest solution is usually the correct one. – William of Occam, fourteenth century Darwin’s Blade: All other things being equal, the simplest solution is usually stupidity. – Darwin Minor, twenty-first century.”

— Dan Simmons

391. “Writers were among my acquaintances but, as in all times, we tended to mistrust and badmouth each other, secretly resenting the others’ successes and finding fault in their work. Each of us knew in his or her heart that he or she was a true artist of the word who merely happened to be commercial; the others were hacks.”

— Dan Simmons

392. “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

393. “Anyway,” I said, “the almost universal reaction to the poem – according to Grandam – was that it was weakened by this sentimentality.”

— Dan Simmons

394. “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

395. “Evolution brings human beings. Human beings, through a long and painful process, bring humanity.” “Empathy,” Aenea said softly. Father Glaucus turned his blind eyes in her direction. “Precisely, my dear.”

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

397. “This is poetry. You’re writing about Heaven’s Gate and the Caribou Herd, but what comes across is loneliness, displacement, angst, and a cynical look at humanity.”

— Dan Simmons

398. “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

399. “Being born again doesn’t mean that you’ve arrived somewhere,” said Dave. “It means you’re ready to start the trip. The pilgrimage to more places of power, the doomed quest to keep the people and things you love from being caught by the weeds and dragged under.”

— Dan Simmons

400. “The best lack all conviction,” he thought, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Dur.”

— Dan Simmons