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Dan Simmons

94 quotes

“The universe is indifferent to our fates. This was the crushing burden that the character took with him as he struggled through the surf toward survival or extinction. The universe just does not give a shit.”
Dan Simmons (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I heard the hiss and felt the blessed numbness spreading. If there is a God, I thought, it’s a painkiller.”
Dan Simmons (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Entropy is a bitch,” I said. “Now, now,” said Aenea from where she was leaning on the terrace wall. “Entropy can be our friend.” “When?” I said. She turned around so that she was leaning back on her elbows. The building behind her was a dark rectangle, serving to highlight the glow of her sunburned skin. “It wears down empires,” she said. “And does in despotisms.”
Dan Simmons (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Dan Simmons (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The future is never written...only penciled in.”
Dan Simmons (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I began to understand. “A Faustian bargain...,” I said. “The Faustian bargain,” said the girl. “All the church had to do to gain the universe was sell its soul.”
Dan Simmons (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life is brutal that way...the loss of irrecoverable moments amid trivia and distraction.”
Dan Simmons (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Dan Simmons (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Never make unsupportable assumptions about your enemies, Martin. It can be a fatal self-indulgence.”
Dan Simmons (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Aenea smiled but her eyes still glistened. “Humans have been waiting for Jesus and Yahweh and E. T. to save their asses since before they covered those asses with bearskins and came out of the cave,” she said. “They’ll have to keep waiting. This is our business...our fight...and we have to take care of it ourselves.”
Dan Simmons (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Dan Simmons (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What?” “Never mind. It will make sense when it comes about. All improbabilities do when probability waves collapse into event.”
Dan Simmons (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Dan Simmons (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Dogma and hierarchy are endemic to such structures...indeed, such are the structures of any theocracy.”
Dan Simmons (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The human mind gets used to strangeness very quickly if it does not exhibit interesting behavior.”
Dan Simmons (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Dan Simmons (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Dan Simmons (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Crudely effective, but wildly inefficient.”
Dan Simmons (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am of no faith,” said Aenea. “If one defines faith as belief in the supernatural.”
Dan Simmons (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Dan Simmons (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“While I was obsessed with my own misery, there were other things occurring in the human universe.”
Dan Simmons (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Dan Simmons (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Dan Simmons (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If the universe has any soul, it is the soul of irony.”
Dan Simmons (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If one is to observe, M. Endymion, one must be in the proper place to observe.”
Dan Simmons (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Dan Simmons (1948–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source