Dan Simmons Quotes

It occurs to me that our survival may depend upon our talking to one another.

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

There is no doubt that I have discovered the ultimate in stagnant human societies. The Bikura have realized the human dream of immortality and have paid for it with their humanity and their immortal souls.

The shortest route to courage is absolute ignorance.

Stupidity has a price and it always gets paid.

Love was as hardwired into the structure of the universe as gravity and matter.

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.

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.

Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.

Sometimes ... dreams are all that separate us from the machines.

No book or poem is ever finished, merely abandoned.

A token of ecological awareness in a society devoted to self destruction and waste but unwilling to acknowledge its indulgent ways.

Each heart has its graveyard, each household its dead, And knells ring around us wherever we tread, And the feet that awhile made our pathway so bright Pass on to a land that is out of our sight.

Context is to data what water is to a dolphin

There is a fullness and calmness there which can come only from knowing pain.

The love of violence is an aspect of our humanity. Even the weak wish to be strong primarily so they can wield the whip.

Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers.

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.

Love is nothing but lust misspelled.

In the end--when all else is dust--loyalty to those we love is all we can carry with us to the grave. Faith--true faith--was trusting in that love.

It's one of the strangest attributes of this profession that when we writers get exhausted writing one thing, we relax by writing another.

Words are the light and sound of our existence, the heat lightning by which the night is illuminated.

The beauty of that June day was almost staggering. After the wet spring, everything that could turn green had outdone itself in greenness and everything that could even dream of blooming or blossoming was in bloom and blossom. The sunlight was a benediction. The breezes were so caressingly soft and intimate on the skin as to be embarrassing.

The whole planet reeks of mysticism without revelation.

Power: a currency that never went out of style.