Dan Simmons: Humanity

Dan Simmons is American novelist. Explore interesting quotes on humanity.
Dan Simmons: 208 quotes2 likes

“Almost everything interesting in the human experience is the result of an individual experiencing, experimenting, explaining, and sharing,” said my young friend. “A hive mind would be the ancient television broadcasts, or life at the height of the datasphere…consensual idiocy.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 21 (p. 464)

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

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

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.

“In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion

“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.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

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

“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.”

Dan Simmons book The Fall of Hyperion

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

“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.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

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

“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.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

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

“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.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

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

“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.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

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

“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.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

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

“Human philosophy tends to shake down into values which might be categorizes as intellectual, religious, moral, and aesthetic.”

Dan Simmons book The Fall of Hyperion

Source: The Fall of Hyperion (1990), Chapter 41 (p. 419)

“After fifty-five years of dedicating his life and work to the story of ethical systems, Sol Weintraub had come to a single, unshakable conclusion: any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principal (sic) which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being was evil.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 4 (p. 292)

“Listen! There will be no more offerings, neither child nor parent. There will be no more sacrifices for anyone other than our fellow human. The time of obedience and atonement is past.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 4 (p. 308)

“While I was obsessed with my own misery, there were other things occurring in the human universe.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 21 (p. 422)

“The human mind gets used to strangeness very quickly if it does not exhibit interesting behavior.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 12 (p. 227)

“As is always the case when you are with the actual human being behind the celebrity or legend, there is something human about the man or woman that makes things less than myth.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 33 (p. 677)