Dan Simmons Quotes

As for the depiction of the Catholic church, it's not meant to be a prediction

It occurs to me that our survival may depend upon our talking to one another.

There is no doubt that I have discovered the ultimate in stagnant human societies. The Bikura have realized the human dream of immortality and have paid for it with their humanity and their immortal souls.

The Great Change is when humankind accepts its role as part of the natural order of the universe instead of its role as a cancer

Poetry is only secondarily about words. Primarily, it is about truth. I dealt with the Ding an Sich, the substance behind the shadow, weaving powerful concepts, similes, and connections the way an engineer would raise a skyscraper with the whiskered-alloy skeleton being constructed long before the glass and plastic and chromaluminum appears.

Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers.

If everyone could understand the working of a psychopath's mind, we undoubtedly would be closer to insanity ourselves.

The future is like smoke from a burning forest, waiting for the wind of specific events and personal courage to blow the sparks and embers of reality this way or that.

She had always felt that the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unself-conscious flow of little things - the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossings and connections casual, dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal.

Nobody gets beyond a petroleum economy. Not while there's petroleum there.

The beauty of that June day was almost staggering. After the wet spring, everything that could turn green had outdone itself in greenness and everything that could even dream of blooming or blossoming was in bloom and blossom. The sunlight was a benediction. The breezes were so caressingly soft and intimate on the skin as to be embarrassing.

Seduction... was both a science and art - a blend of skill, discipline, proximity, and opportunity. Mostly proximity.

Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.

History viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.

The shortest route to courage is absolute ignorance.

Love was as hardwired into the structure of the universe as gravity and matter.

Movie SF is, by definition, dumbed down - there have only been three or four SF movies in the history of film that aspire to the complexity of literary SF.

To see and feel one's beloved naked for the first time is one of life's pure, irreducible epiphanies. If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include that truth of contact or be forever hollow. To make love to the one true person who deserves that love is one of the few absolute rewards of being a human being, balancing all of the pain, loss, awkwardness, loneliness, idiocy, compromise, and clumsiness that go with the human condition. To make love to the right person makes up for a lot of mistakes.

A token of ecological awareness in a society devoted to self destruction and waste but unwilling to acknowledge its indulgent ways.

Love is nothing but lust misspelled.

The love of violence is an aspect of our humanity. Even the weak wish to be strong primarily so they can wield the whip.

I now understand the need for faith - pure, blind, fly-in-the-face-of-reason faith - as a small life preserver in the wild and endless sea of a universe ruled by unfeeling laws and totally indifferent to the small, reasoning beings that inhabit it.

Anticlimax is, of course, the warp and way of things. Real life seldom structures a decent denouement.

In such seconds of decision entire futures are made.

As long as my sixth graders showed an average improvement of five years, the principal and district pretty much left me alone to create my own curriculum and teach whatever I wanted

It started 25 years ago, when I was teaching elementary school in a small town in Missouri

Most of us do know we have no immortality. And when you've found a genius, someone who has already purchased his immortality in musical or literary terms, it's maddening.

Wilkie Collins was a rival and competitor of Dickens. His novel Moonstone sold more copies at the time than Dickens' last two books. But that meant nothing in the long run. Right now, to be honest, Wilkie Collins is what he deserved to be back then: a footnote, an almost lost memory. And he knew he would become that.

It's one of the strangest attributes of this profession that when we writers get exhausted writing one thing, we relax by writing another.

Those who ignore history's lessons in the ultimate folly of war are forced to do more than relive them ... they may be forced to die by them.

A hero. You want to be one of those rare human beings who make history, rather than merely watch it flow around them like water around a rock.

The truth is, it's not a great career move to create a readership and then, in effect, abandon them.

The young remember most deeply.... When we are old and failing, it is the memories of childhood which can be summoned most clearly.

Once upon a time ... the only autonomous intelligences we humans knew of were us humans. We thought then that if humankind ever devised another intelligence that it would be the result of a huge project ... a great mass of silicon and ancient transistors and chips and circuit boards ... a machine with lots of networking circuits, in other words, aping-if you will pardon the expression-the human brain in form and function. Of course, AIs did not evolve that way. They sort of slipped into existence when we humans were looking the other way.

Losing our ignorance can be dangerous because our ignorance is a shield.

We are all eaters of souls.

There's a unique bond of trust between readers and authors that I don't believe exists in any other art form; as a reader, I trust a novelist to give me his or her best effort, however flawed.

The past is dead and buried. But I know now that buried things have a way of rising to the surface when one least expects them to.

I think all the simple things can and do still work - holding your child's hand while walking across the street will do it. But we can hardly hear it for all the noise which has turned love into a cliche, and most people can't even hear John Lennon's "All You Need Is Love" anymore without wincing.

Fate and victory shift ... now this way, now that way -- like a line of unarmored men under a hail of enemy arrows.

There is a fullness and calmness there which can come only from knowing pain.

No lifetime is long enough for those ... who simply wish to understand themselves and their lives. It is, perhaps, the curse of being human, but also a blessing.

If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include the truth of contact or be forever hollow.

Writing, Im convinced, should be a subversive activity - frowned on by the authorities - and not one cooed over and praised beyond common sense by some teacher.

But I think, and hope, that the novels can be understood and enjoyed as science fiction, on their own terms.

Artists recognize other artists as soon as the pencil begins to move.

I despair at the rise of modern violence. I truly give in to despair at times, that deep, futureless pit of despair.... I watch the American slaughterhouse, the casual attacks on popes, presidents, and uncounted others, and I wonder if there are many more out there with the Ability or if butchery has simply become the modern way of life.

There were reprints of American editorials. Liberals saw it as a resurgence of social protest and decried the discrimination, poverty, and hunger that had provoked it. Conservative columnists acidly pointed out that hungry people don't steal stereo systems first and called for a crackdown in law enforcement. All of the reasoned editorials sounded hollow in light of the perverse randomness of the event. It was as if only a thin wall of electric lighting protected the great cities of the world from total barbarism.

There is a certain solipsism to serious illness which claims all of one's attention as certainly as an astronomical black hole seizes anything unlucky enough to fall within its critical radius.

The powerful have received their share of the world's attention even when their power has been shown as sheer evil. The victim's remain the faceless masses. Numbers. Mass graves. These monsters have fertilized our century with the mass graves of their victims and it is time that the powerless had names and faces -- and voices.