Top 400 Dan Simmons Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

365. “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

366. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

368. “We all retreat into ourselves in some way.”

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

370. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

372. “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

373. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

386. “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

387. “Outside the port, the slashed rock of the unnamed asteroid tumbled and spun in dynamics known only to the gods of chaos mathematics.”

— Dan Simmons

388. “We thought we were special, opening our perceptions, honing our empathy, spilling that cauldron of shared pain onto the dance floor of language and then trying to make a minuet out of all that chaotic hurt.”

— Dan Simmons

389. “The voice, sounding more than ever to Sol like some cut-rate holie director’s shallow idea of what God’s voice should sound like, came again: “Sol! You must listen well. The future of humankind depends upon your obedience in this matter. You must take your daughter, your daughter Rachel whom you love, and go to the world called Hyperion and offer her there as a burnt offering at one of the places of which I shall tell you.” And.”

— Dan Simmons

390. “Maybe reading is a sort of curse is all I mean, concluded Fowler. Maybe it’s better for a man to stay inside his own mind.”

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

392. “Call me Mort, Sol.”

— Dan Simmons

393. “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

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

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

399. “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

400. “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