“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.”

— Dan Simmons, book The Rise of Endymion

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

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American novelist 1948

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