Quotes from Dan Simmons

Admiral," said Gladstone, "is it absolutely necessary to destroy the singularity sphere as soon as the Ousters have penetrated our cordon sanitaire? Couldn't we wait another few minutes to judge their intentions?" "No, CEO," answered the Admiral promptly. "The farcaster link must be destroyed as soon as they are within quick assault range.

Agamemnon: Our prayer was simple — to raze Ilium's walls to its roots, kill its heroes, rape its women, enslave its people. Is that too much to ask?

the difference between finding the right word as opposed to accepting the almost right word was the difference between being struck by lightning and merely watching a lightning display.

I realize now that what I was trying to do with the Armaghast data was offer the Church not a rebirth but only a transition to a false life such as these poor walking corpses inhabit. If the Church is meant to die, it must do so—but do so gloriously, in the full knowledge of its rebirth in Christ.

Love, that most banal of things, that most clichéd of religious motivations, had more power—Sol now knew—than did strong nuclear force or weak nuclear force or electromagnetism or gravity. Love was these other forces, Sol realized. The Void Which Binds, the subquantum impossibility that carried information from photon to photon, was nothing more or less than love.

Look," said Lamia, "what good would telling each other stories do? When we meet the Shrike, we tell it what we want, one of us is granted the wish, and the others die. Correct?

I knew him, Horatio," said the drunken poet. "A man of infinite jest. Not one of them funny. A real horse's ass, Horatio.

We will revel in hardships and welcome strangeness. We will not make the universe adapt Ã¢â'¬Â¦ we shall adapt.

The strongest beings are those who sing themselves into existence.

Well, nothing helps an artist's career more than a little death and obscurity, I always say.

Martin Silenus sniffed a jar, found a knife on the sandwich plate, and added great dollops of horseradish to his sandwich. His eyes sparkled with tears as he ate.

This is all too important." Aenea smiled. "It's all too important. That's the damned problem, isn't it?" She turned her face back to the stars.

For our race to achieve the true satori, for us to move to that next level of consciousness and evolution that so many of our philosophies proclaim, all facets of human endeavor must become conscious strivings for art.

I discovered that the difference between finding the right word as opposed to accepting the almost right word was the difference between being struck by lightning and merely watching a lightning display.

He sits in the straight-backed chair next to the bed and lifts a cooling cup of tea. "If you die, what happens to me?" "I don't know," I say honestly. "If I die, I don't even know what happens to me.

I wish I could help him. I wish I could help the dozens of other Sufferers - all the victims of wounds, maulings, burns, diseases, incipient malnutrition, and melancholic despair - aboard this entrapped ship and her sister ship. I wish I could help myself, for already I am showing the early signs of Nostalgia and Debility. But there is little that I - or any surgeon in the Year of Our Lord 1848 - can do. God help us all.

Among us we represent islands of time as well as separate oceans of perspective. Or perhaps more aptly put, each of us may hold a piece to a puzzle no one else has been able to solve since humankind first landed on Hyperion.

I learned that poets aren't God, but if there is a God … or anything approaching a God … he's a poet. And a failed one at that.

however confused my religious notions have become these days, they do not include the worship of an organic killing machine.

Human philosophy tends to shake down into values which might be categorized as intellectual, religious, moral, and aesthetic.

the lightning dance of gigantic hellwhip displays, beams the size of small worlds cutting their swath across light-hours and being contorted by the riptides of defensive singularities: the aurora shimmer of defense fields leaping and dying under the assault of terrible energies only to be reborn nanoseconds later.

If there really was a goddess like Sedna who ruled the world, her real name was Bitch Irony.

Dad," said Rachel, "I'm going to ask you a question I've asked about a million times since I was two. Do you believe in God?" Sol had not smiled. He had no choice but to give her the answer he had given her a million times. "I'm waiting to," he said.

Hunt shook his head and quit writing. "I don't understand. You can become this Ã¢â'¬Â¦ messiah Ã¢â'¬Â¦ by leaving your deathbed?" The pale oval of Keats's face moved back and forth on the pillow in a motion which might have been a substitute for laughter. "We all could have, Hunt. Humankind's folly and greatest pride. We accept our pain. We make way for our children. That earned us the right to become the God we dreamed of.