Top 400 Dan Simmons Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “We all retreat into ourselves in some way.”

— Dan Simmons

352. “Suddenly a scream froze her in her tracks. It.”

— Dan Simmons

353. “From what Paul tells me,” said the Monsignor, “the Consul was true to his convictions, faithful to the memory of his grandmother Siri.”

— Dan Simmons

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

357. “Anything which deceives is evil, I believe.”

— Dan Simmons

358. “You stay with her. I’ll follow it in.”

— Dan Simmons

359. “This was, without a doubt, the cruciform of which the Bikura spoke. And it had been set here a minimum of many thousands of years ago – perhaps tens of thousands – long before mankind first left Old Earth. Almost certainly before Christ taught in Galilee. I.”

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

361. “I was getting used to the caustic voice in my head. It and I had made a peace when I realized that it wasn’t urging me to lie down and die, just critiquing my inadequate efforts to stay alive.”

— Dan Simmons

362. “But I bet it’s more complicated than that. There’re places of power – yeah – no doubt about that. But it’s like we were talking about last night. You have to help make them. You have to be in the right place at the right time and know it.” “How do you know it?” asked Baedecker. “By dreaming about it but not thinking about it,” Dave said.”

— Dan Simmons

363. “We all want to leave monuments.”

— Dan Simmons

364. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

366. “But they were beautiful. When they died, rippling in rainbow colors, their many-hued messages unseen, unheard by their fleeing herdmates, the beauty of their death agony was beyond words. We sold their photoreceptive skins to Web corporations, their flesh to worlds like Heaven’s Gate, and ground their bones to powder to sell as aphrodisiacs to the impotent and superstitious on a score of other colony worlds. On.”

— Dan Simmons

367. “Sarai gripped his hand. “Do you think you’re the only one who has had the dream?” “Dream?” managed Sol. She.”

— Dan Simmons

368. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

370. “I nodded, understanding nothing.”

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

376. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

378. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

382. “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

383. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

385. “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

386. “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

387. “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

388. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

390. “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

391. “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

392. “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

393. “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

394. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

396. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

399. “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

400. “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