Quotes from Dan Simmons

in Theo – quiet, efficient Theo – to get him through the morning. Trusting in luck to get him through the day. Trusting in the drinking at Cicero's to get him through the night. Trusting in the unimportance of his posting to get him through life.

But love...of whom? I say at last. Of what? What great passion would forestall death? Her graceful eyebrow arches, You do not know? You, a poet? I do not know. I say as much. She leans forward so that I can hear the rustle of her starched cotton blouse and silk beneath. Our faces are so close that I can feel the warmth from her skin. Then you need more time to learn, she whispers, her voice as filled with emotion as when she cried out last night.

Crozier hurts to the cavity in the center of his self where he is sure his soul had resided until it floated away on a sea of whiskey over the decades.

apocalyptic statuary of the post-Hegira expansionist period. I

Above me, far out from the cliff, a wide-winged Thomas Hawk circles above the lagoon on rising thermals and scans the shifting bluekelp beds with its infrared vision, seeking out harp seals or torpids. Nature is stupid, I think and sit in the soft grass.

Even if it all fails, it was worth the time," Saul Laski said softly. "The powerful have received their share of the world's attention even when their power has been shown as sheer evil. The victims remain the faceless masses. Numbers. Mass graves. These monsters have fertilized our century with the mass graves of their victims and it is time that the powerless had names and faces—and voices.

Outside the port, the slashed rock of the unnamed asteroid tumbled and spun in dynamics known only to the gods of chaos mathematics.

People scream and run for coyer.

watch as the dense forest shifts from chrome yellow to a translucent saffron and then slowly fades through ocher to umber to gloom.

susurration

The firstdown team for this planet must have had a fixation on animals. Horse, Bear, Eagle. For three days we were creeping down the east coast of Equus over an irregular coastline called the Mane. We've spent the last day making the crossing of a short span of the Middle Sea to a large island called Cat Key. Today we are offloading passengers and freight at Felix, the "major city" of the island.

affectation.

Aye, on the shores of darkness there is light,    And precipices show untrodden green; There is a budding morrow in midnight;    There is triple sight in blindness keen Ã¢â'¬Â¦

I love life, Eleanor. It is that simple. Had I the choice, I would live forever, accepting pain and loss as my due and learning--across time--even to appreciate the sharp seasoning of this sadness.

For the record, here is my entire vocabulary of manageable words: fuck, shit, piss, cunt, goddamn, motherfucker, asshole, peepee, and poopoo.

seedship colony from three centuries earlier and clearly described a group suffering all of the classic retrograde cultural effects of extreme isolation, inbreeding, and overadaptation

Soon she would have to wake, tend the fire, serve the men, care for the younger children, and face the end of a childhood she had barely known. Soon she would become the property of a man other than her father, and on that day she would receive the traditional Hindu blessing—May you have eight sons.

was being greeted by a silent, smiling band of bald, retarded children.

that strange elasticity of the human heart in finding new relationships, new people to share one's life with, new potentials.

The poem celebrated love and loyalty but teetered on the brink of nihilism with its constant thread of corruption through love of power, human ambition and intellectual

that 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.

We come into this world alone, We depart alone,    This also is illusion. I will teach you the way Not to come, not to go!

Not merely to preserve a few species from Old Earth, but to find unity in diversity. To spread the seed of humankind to all worlds, diverse environments, while treating as sacred the diversity of life we find elsewhere.

And what was our DNA designed to do for the first few hundred million years, my son? Eat? Kill? Procreate? Were we any less ignoble in our beginnings than the pre-Hegira silicon and DNA-based AIs? As Teilhard would have it, it is consciousness which God has created to accelerate the universe's self-awareness as a means to understanding His will.