Dan Simmons Quotes

“There are no ghosts, my love. Death is final. The soul is that ineffable combination of memory and personality which we carry through life…when life departs, the soul also dies. Except for what we leave in the memory of those who loved us.”

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 10 (p. 166)

““The Void Which Binds is touched by all of us who have wept with happiness, bidden a lover good-bye, been exalted with orgasm, stood over the grave of a loved one, or watched our baby open his or her eyes for the first time.”
Aenea is looking at me as she speaks, and I feel the gooseflesh rise along my arms.
“The Void Which Binds is always under and above the surface of our thoughts and senses,” she continues, invisible but as present as the breathing of our beloved next to us in the night. Its actual but unaccessible presence in our universe is one of the prime causes for our species elaborating myth and religion, for our stubborn, blind belief in extrasensory powers, in telepathy and precognition, in demons and demigods and resurrection and reincarnation and ghosts and messiahs and so many other categories of almost-but-not-quite satisfying bullshit.””

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 27 (p. 578)

“In the beginning was the Word.
In the end…past honor, past life, past caring…
In the end will be the Word.”

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 20 (p. 400)

Dan Simmons Quotes about life

“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.”

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 3 (p. 233)

“I don’t think that I want to make any wager if it means dealing with a Church that has grown so corrupt that it makes obedience and submission the price of its saving the life of someone’s child.”

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 1 (p. 90)

“We know for a fact that the Buddha refused to speculate with his disciples on whether there was such a thing such as life after death. ‘Such questions,’ he said, ‘are not relevant to the practice of the Path and cannot be answered while bound by the restraints of human existence.’ Most of Buddhism, you see, gentlemen, can be explored, appreciated, and utilized as a tool toward enlightenment without descending into the supernatural.”

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 10 (p. 165)

“Life is brutal that way…the loss of irrecoverable moments amid trivia and distraction.”

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 19 (p. 375)

“And the sad fact is that all nanotech life out of our control—out of anyone’s control. The essence of nanotech life’s evolution is autonomy, self-will, and goals which have nothing to do with those of the harboring life form.
Humanity, you mean, said Lourdusamy.
Precisely.”

Source: Endymion (1996), Chapter 60 (p. 561)

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

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 13 (p. 261)

Dan Simmons: Trending quotes

“Evolution brings human beings. Human beings, through a long and painful process, bring humanity.”

Source: Hyperion

“The shortest route to courage is absolute ignorance.”

Source: Endymion (1996), Chapter 44 (p. 449)
Source: Hyperion
Context: “Humanity has evolved—as far as it has evolved,” continued the old priest, “with no thanks to its predecessors or itself. Evolution brings human beings. Human beings, through a long and painful process, bring humanity.”
“Empathy,” Aenea said softly.

“Words are the only bullets in truth’s bandolier. And poets are the snipers.”

Source: Endymion

Dan Simmons Quotes

“Mobs have passions, not brains.”

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 3 (p. 192)

“Its hard to die. Harder to live”

Source: The Fall of Hyperion (1990), Chapter 32 (p. 266)

“Luckily, even as a young man not yet become himself, John Bridgens had two things besides indecision that kept him from self-destruction - books and a sense of irony.”

Source: The Fall of Hyperion

Dan Simmons book The Terror

Source: The Terror

“Belief in one’s identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one’s immortality…and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.”

“We are all eaters of souls.”

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 3 (p. 186)

Dan Simmons book The Terror

Source: The Terror

“You are quite acute for a mental stillborn”

Dan Simmons

“The lieutenant took his time scanning their visa chips, letting them wait in the drizzle, occasionally making a comment with the idle arrogance common to such nobodies who have just come into a small bit of power.”

“Sol realized what he had known and forgotten about very small communities: they were frequently annoying, always parochial, sometimes prying on a one-to-one level, but never had they subscribed to the vicious legacy of the so-called “public’s right to know.””

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 2 (p. 105)

“I thought—To lose all this forever?
And I hallucinated Aenea’s voice saying To lose all this forever is the essence of being human, my love.”

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 4 (p. 287)

“It no longer matters who consider themselves the masters of events. Events no longer obey their masters.”

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 10 (p. 163)

“I am of no faith,” said Aenea. “If one defines faith as belief in the supernatural.”

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 6 (p. 472)

“Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.”

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 19 (p. 371)

“Information is always to be treasured, Raul. It is behind only love and honesty in a person’s attempt to understand the universe.”

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 3 (p. 191)

“I wish we had the technology to fight God on an equal basis,” he said in low, tight tones. “To beard him in his den. To fight back for all of the injustices heaped on humanity. To allow him to alter his smug arrogance or be blown to hell.”

Source: Endymion (1996), Chapter 25 (p. 198)

“It was a dramatization of total chaos, a functional definition of confusion, an unchoreographed dance of sad violence. It was war.”

Source: The Fall of Hyperion (1990), Chapter 29 (pp. 226-227)

“Crudely effective, but wildly inefficient.”

Source: The Fall of Hyperion (1990), Chapter 7 (p. 51)

“I was not surprised to wake up alive. I suppose one is surprised only when one awakens dead.”

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 17 (p. 334)

““What was the Depression?”
“Bad economic times in their pure capitalist nation-state,” Aenea said. “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.””

Source: Endymion (1996), Chapter 4 (p. 20)

“The place was part museum, part library, and part archive; I loved it at first sight…and smell, for here there were thousands of printed books, many very old indeed, and nothing smells quite as wonderful as old books.”

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 2 (p. 34)

“The future is never written…only penciled in.”

Source: The Fall of Hyperion (1990), Chapter 32 (p. 269)

“I learned that poets aren’t God, but if there is a God…or anything approaching a God…he’s a poet. And a failed one at that.”

Source: Endymion (1996), Chapter 50 (p. 497)

“Sol found their tracts the usual combination of double talk and navel lint-gathering common to most religions.”

Source: The Fall of Hyperion (1990), Chapter 45 (p. 504)

“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.”

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 4 (p. 269)

““What?”
“Never mind. It will make sense when it comes about. All improbabilities do when probability waves collapse into event.””

Source: The Fall of Hyperion (1990), Chapter 38 (p. 369)

“Why am I seeking logic or sanity here? I'd asked myself at the moment. There hasn’t been any so far.”

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 8 (p. 135)

“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.”

Source: Endymion (1996), Chapter 25 (p. 190)

“He knew what had to be done. It is not always the same as knowing what to do.”

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 18 (pp. 348-349)

“There would be no more offerings. Not this day. Not any day. Humankind had suffered enough for its love of gods, its long search for God. He thought of the many centuries in which his people, the Jews, had negotiated with God, complaining, bickering, decrying the unfairness of things but always—always—returning to obedience at whatever the cost. Generations dying in the ovens of hatred. Future generations scarred by the cold fires of radiation and renewed hatred.
Not this time. Not ever again.”

Source: The Fall of Hyperion (1990), Chapter 34 (p. 310)

“Sarai had treasured every stage of Rachel’s childhood, enjoying the day-to-day normalcy of things; a normalcy which she quietly accepted as the best of life. She had always felt that the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and the 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 crossing and connections casual, dialogues imminently (sic) forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal.”

Source: The Fall of Hyperion (1990), Chapter 30 (p. 237)

“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.”

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 4 (p. 284)

“I realized that night the import and the terrible difficulty in the task ahead of me—in keeping this child safe from the sharp edges of a strange and indifferent universe.
I think that is was on this alien and storm-tossed night that I first understood what it might be like to be a parent.”

Source: The Fall of Hyperion (1990), Chapter 12 (p. 94)

“Twenty kilometers. At an average speed of 120 klicks per hour, we should cover the distance in ten minutes. Ten freezing, adrenaline-pumping, gorge-rising, terror-beating-against-the-ribs, react-in-a-microsecond-or-die seconds.”

Source: Endymion (1996), Chapter 30 (p. 262)

“There is something about raising a child that helps to sharpen one’s sense of what is real.”

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 15 (p. 297)

“De Soya blinks. “Suicide is a mortal sin,” he says.
On the screen the girl nods seriously. “Yes,” she says, “but I am not a Christian. Also, I'd rather go to hell than go with you.””

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 6 (p. 433)

“Another friend, a child psychologist from the college, once commented that Rachel at age five showed the most reliable indicators of true giftedness in a young person: structured curiosity, empathy for others, compassion, and a fierce sense of fair play.”

Source: Endymion (1996), Chapter 24 (p. 184)

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

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 4 (p. 249)

“Christ may have lost his faith for a few seconds; He did not sell it in the marketplace for the trinkets of ego and curiosity.”

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 3 (p. 192)

“Sometimes,” said General Morpurgo, taking her hand, “dreams are all that separate us from the machines.”

Source: The Fall of Hyperion (1990), Chapter 34 (p. 310)

“These were not religious fanatics, I saw, not mindless servants or self-punishing ascetics, but were, instead, row upon row of intelligent, questioning, alert young men and women.”

Source: The Fall of Hyperion (1990), Chapter 43 (p. 474)

“If one is to observe, M. Endymion, one must be in the proper place to observe.”

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 21 (p. 454)

“I ached everywhere. It was hard to separate the dull agony of the shattered leg from the ache in my head and my back and my guts. My skull felt as if there were a ball of mercury in it that shifted ponderously long seconds after my head itself turned. The vertigo made me sick again, but I had nothing left to vomit. I hung on the tangle of branches and contemplated the glories of adventure.”

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 34 (p. 701)

“How about,” she said, “that you do the logical thing because it’s the logical thing to do?”

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 14 (p. 272)

“I realized that for this moment, nothing in the past mattered. Nothing terrible in the future mattered. What mattered was her skin against me, her hand holding me, the perfume of her hair and skin and the warmth of her breath against my chest. This was satori. This was truth.”

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 5 (p. 315)

““Gold,” says the Consul, knowing that this is the only syllable that has held its power over the ages.”

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 25 (p. 532)

“I realized then what I had known since I was a child watching my mother die of cancer—namely, that beyond ideology and ambition, beyond thought and emotion, there was only pain. And salvation from it.”

Source: The Fall of Hyperion (1990), Chapter 35 (p. 316)

“Thus evolved some members of the Core—not altruists, but desperate survivalists who realized that the only way ultimately to win their never-ending zero-sum game was to stop the game. And to stop the game they needed to evolve into a species capable of empathy.”

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 8 (p. 121)

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

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 20 (p. 406)

“Although there are those among us now who have been granted the gift of being able to glimpse patterns of the future, probabilities tossed like dice on the uneven blanket of space and time, even these gifted ones know that no single future has been preordained for us or our posterity. Events are fluid. 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.”

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 33 (p. 684)

“One of the men in the boat—I could not remember which character—had moved through all of the circles of theological supposition: praying, believing that God was a merciful Deity who sat up nights worrying about him, then believing that God was a cruel bastard, and finally deciding that no one was listening.”

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 25 (pp. 535-536)