Quotes from book
The Rise of Endymion

The Rise of Endymion
Dan Simmons

The Rise of Endymion is a 1997 science fiction novel by American writer Dan Simmons. It is the fourth and final novel in his Hyperion Cantos fictional universe. It won the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, and was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1998.

“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.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

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

““Pascal’s Wager never appealed to me. It seems logically… shallow.”
“Perhaps because it posits only two choices,” said Aenea. Somewhere in the desert night, an owl made a short, sharp sound. “Spiritual resurrection and immortality or death and damnation,” she said.
“Those last two aren’t the same thing,” I said.
“No, but perhaps to someone like Blaise Pascal they were. Someone terrified of ‘the eternal silence of these infinite spaces.’”
“A spiritual agoraphobic,” I said.
Aenea laughed. The sound was so sincere and spontaneous that I could not help loving it. Her.
“Religion seems to have always offered that false duality,” she said, setting her cup of tea on a flat stone. “The silences of infinite space or the cozy comfort of inner certainty.””

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

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

“If there is a true secret to the universe, it is this…these first few seconds of warmth and entry and complete acceptance by one’s beloved.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 25 (p. 531)

“Each of them was intimately aware of the procedure for electing a pope—not only of the antiquated mechanisms, of course, but of the politicking, pressuring, deal-making, bluffing, and outright blackmail that had often accompanied the process over the centuries.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 1 (p. 10)

“One of the few benefits of the fall of civilization as we know it,” he says, “is that there are private cellars with fine vintages everywhere one digs. It is not theft. It is archaeology.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 33 (p. 674)

“I could not do this, I realized, if I were immortal. This degree of love of life and of one another is granted, I saw for once and for ever, not to immortals, but to those who live briefly and always under the shadow of death and loss.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 32 (p. 665)

““Perhaps our reservoir of spiritual faith has run out.”
“Perhaps it should have run out a long time ago,” I said sternly. “Superstition has taken a terrible toll on our species. Wars… pogroms… resistance to logic and science and medicine… not to mention gathering power in the hands of people like those who run the Pax.””

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

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

“If the universe has any soul, it is the soul of irony.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 25 (p. 548)

“Dogma and hierarchy are endemic to such structures…indeed, such are the structures of any theocracy.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 11 (p. 187)

““The Core knows what Teilhard de Chardin and other sentimentalists refused to acknowledge: evolution is not progress, that there is no ‘goal’ or direction to evolution. Evolution is change. Evolution ‘succeeds’ if that change best adapts some leaf or branch of its tree of life to conditions of the universe.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

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

“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)

“There is no guarantee of happiness, wisdom, or long life if you drink of me this evening,” she says, very softly. There is no nirvana. There is no salvation. There is no afterlife. There is no rebirth. There is only immense knowledge—of the heart as well as the mind—and the potential for great discoveries, great adventures, and and a guarantee of more of the pain and terror that make up so much of our short lives.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 20 (p. 408)

“Never make unsupportable assumptions about your enemies, Martin. It can be a fatal self-indulgence.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 3 (p. 49)

“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)

“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.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

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 20 (p. 400)

“Pascal’s Wager never appealed to me. It seems logically…shallow.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

“Perhaps because it posits only two choices,” said Aenea. Somewhere in the desert night, an owl made a short, sharp sound. “Spiritual resurrection and immortality or death and damnation,” she said.
“Those last two aren’t the same thing,” I said.
“No, but perhaps to someone like Blaise Pascal they were. Someone terrified of ‘the eternal silence of these infinite spaces.’”
“A spiritual agoraphobic,” I said.
Aenea laughed. The sound was so sincere and spontaneous that I could not help loving it. Her.
“Religion seems to have always offered that false duality,” she said, setting her cup of tea on a flat stone. “The silences of infinite space or the cozy comfort of inner certainty.”
Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 10 (p. 166)