Dan Simmons: Trending quotes

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

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

“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 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 1 (p. 90)

“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)

Dan Simmons book Endymion

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

“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.”

“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)

Dan Simmons book Endymion

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

“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.”

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

“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)

Dan Simmons book Endymion

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

“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.”

“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)