Quotes from Dan Simmons

Poetry is only secondarily about words. Primarily, it is about truth.

Commander Lebedev wrote—'After a communication session we invited Flight Engineer Savitskaya to the heavily laden table. We gave Sveta a blue floral print apron and told her, " 'Look, Sveta, even though you are a pilot and cosmonaut, you are still a woman first. Would you please do us the honor of being our hostess tonight?' " "Ouch," says Roth

Hobbes's Leviathan. Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Trust me. I've seen it in London and I've seen it with shipwreck. Death by scurvy is worse. It would be better if the Thing took us all tonight. And with that we went below to the flame-flickering Darkness of the lower deck and to a cold almost the equal of the Dante-esque Ninth Circle Arctic Night without.

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

God is our refuge and strength, and ever-prethent help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountainth fall into the heart of the sea, though its waterth roar and foam and the mountains quake with their thurging.

Sol looked up as a dozen pinpoints of fierce light expanded into ripples and shock waves of plasma explosions far out in space. "I wish we had the technology to fight God on an equal basis," he said in low, tight tones. "To beard him in his den. To fight back for all of the injustices heaped on humanity. To allow him to alter his smug arrogance or be blown to hell.

shortest route to courage is absolute ignorance.

Johnny-boy shook his head. Maybe he thought I wanted him to drink from the bottle. Hell, I have more class than that. There are paper cups over by the water cooler.

When you meet a swordsman/ meet him with a sword Do not offer a poem to anyone but a poet]

Have you always used a pen?" "No," I said, "only when I want to write something worth reading.

This is some sort of joke, isn't it?" asks Hunt, staring at the flawless blue sky and distant fields. I cough as lightly and briefly as possible into a handkerchief I have made from a towel borrowed from the inn. "Possibly," I say. "But then, what isn't?

I realized at that instant just how surely the affirmation of demons or the summoning of Satan somehow can affirm the reality of their mystic antithesis—the God of Abraham.

Doomed with enfeebled carcass to outstretch His loathed existence through ten centuries

To be a true poet is to become God.

That's all! Now either leave us alone or join us as a father rather than a receiver of sacrifices. You have the choice of Abraham!

Our apartment was filled with photos of us, notes I wrote to myself about us, holos of us on Hyperion, but Ã¢â'¬Â¦ you know. In the morning he would be an absolute stranger. By afternoon I began to believe what we'd had, even if I couldn't remember. By evening I'd be crying in his arms Ã¢â'¬Â¦ then, sooner or later, I'd go to sleep. It's better this way." Rachel

As your priest," says de Soya, "I will warn you again about the use of profanity. As your commanding officer, I order you to come up with as many surprises as you can to kill that spiked son of a bitch." They

In the end, it doesn't matter a damn bit. We thought we were special, opening our perceptions, honing our empathy, spilling that cauldron of shared pain onto the dance floor of language and then trying to make a minuet out of all that chaotic hurt. It doesn't matter a damn bit. We're no avatars, no sons of god or man. We're only us, scribbling our conceits alone, reading alone, and dying alone.

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—

and nothing smells quite as wonderful as old books.

Hoyt's view of hell is tactile; it is the pain which moves in him like jagged wires pulled through his veins and guts.

AIDS II was a human plague disease back long before the Hegira," said Johnny. "It disabled the immune system. This Ã¢â'¬Â¦ virus Ã¢â'¬Â¦ works the same with an AI.

Jehovah had not simply been testing Abraham, but had communicated in the only language of loyalty, obedience, sacrifice, and command that humankind could understand at that point in the relationship.