Dan Simmons Quotes - Page 4

What, after all, is more real to us than the geography of our childhoods?

There were reprints of American editorials. Liberals saw it as a resurgence of social protest and decried the discrimination, poverty, and hunger that had provoked it. Conservative columnists acidly pointed out that hungry people don't steal stereo systems first and called for a crackdown in law enforcement. All of the reasoned editorials sounded hollow in light of the perverse randomness of the event. It was as if only a thin wall of electric lighting protected the great cities of the world from total barbarism.

A hero. You want to be one of those rare human beings who make history, rather than merely watch it flow around them like water around a rock.

Want to talk about Shakespeare's sonnets?" asked Orphu of Io. Are you shitting me?" The moravecs loved the ancient human colloquial phrases, the more scatological the better. Yes," said Orphu. "I am most definitely shitting you, my friend.

Books ... were merely nodes in a near-infinite matrix of information that exists in four dimensions, evolving toward the idea of the concept of the approximation of the shadow of Truth vertically through time as well as longitudinally through knowledge.

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

Speaking as a novelist myself, I know that members of our profession live in our imaginations as much or more as we inhabit what people call 'the real world.

Luckily, even as a young man not yet become himself, John Bridgens had two things besides indecision that kept him from self-destruction - books and a sense of irony.

Once evolution gets a good basic design, it tends to throw away the variants and concentrate on the near-infinite diversity within that design.

Religion seems to have always offered us that false duality ... the silences of infinite space or the cozy comfort of inner certainty.

Doing a life study while drunk and in the process of being seduced is never a formula for quality art.

Lovemaking seems all too absurd when described.

... all good things beyond sleep come precisely because we defy gravity while we live.

Words were like objects, making the idea more solid -- less a poisonous gas and more a ... cube of crystallized thought.

You treat violence as an aberration ... when in truth it is the norm. It is the very essence of the human condition.

War must never be a condition but, rather, a temporary scourge which we suffer as a child does a fever, knowing that health follows the long night of pain and that peace is health.

Nobody gets beyond a petroleum economy. Not while there's petroleum there.

Poetry is only secondarily about words. Primarily, it is about truth. I dealt with the Ding an Sich, the substance behind the shadow, weaving powerful concepts, similes, and connections the way an engineer would raise a skyscraper with the whiskered-alloy skeleton being constructed long before the glass and plastic and chromaluminum appears.

She had always felt that the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and 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 crossings and connections casual, dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal.

Anticlimax is, of course, the warp and way of things. Real life seldom structures a decent denouement.

Losing our ignorance can be dangerous because our ignorance is a shield.

Barbarians, we call them, while all the while we timidly cling to our Web like Visigoths crouching in the ruins of Rome's faded glory and proclaim ourselves civilized.

Human beings have only that confusing mass of chemically driven neurological storage to rely on. They're all subjective and emotion-tinged. How can they trust any of their memories?

How could anyone stay sane with entire lifetimes stored in one human mind?

The young remember most deeply.... When we are old and failing, it is the memories of childhood which can be summoned most clearly.