Quotes from Dan Simmons

He had always distrusted people who asked to speak freely or who vowed to speak candidly or who used the expression "frankly.

America was a nation that refused to grow up. It was a perpetual baby, a vast, pink, fleshy toddler, now in possession of some terrible weapons it did not know how to hold properly, much less use properly.

Are we all illusions? Brief shadows thrown on a white wall for the shallow amusement of bored gods? Is this all?

I don't believe in God with a capital G and, despite their obvious solidity, I don't believe in the gods with their small g's. Not as real forces in the universe. But I believe in the bitch-goddess Irony. She crosses all time. She rules men and gods and God alike.

We are in a comfortable Dark Ages of the inventive mind; institutions change but little, and that by gradual evolution rather than revolution; scientific research creeps crablike in a lateral shuffle, where once it leaped in great intuitive bounds; devices change even less, plateau technologies common to us would be instantly identifiable – and operable! – to our great-grandfathers.

Blood and brain tissue clung to the wet rock like the refuse of a sad picnic.

each time I hear the bells toll the brief notes of the early hours of the morn, I imagine ghostly hands pulling rotting bell ropes. Or perhaps rotting hands pulling ghostly bell ropes; I don't know which image suits my macabre fancies this endless night. Fever

You'll have to ask him in the next life," said Sol tiredly. "He's dead.

On the contrary, it made me feel that faith is all the more essential. Pain and darkness have been our lot since the Fall of Man. But there must be some hope that we can rise to a higher level Ã¢â'¬Â¦ that consciousness can evolve to a plane more benevolent than its counterpoint of a universe hardwired to indifference.

the idle arrogance common to such nobodies who have just come into a small bit of power.

I was getting used to the caustic voice in my head. It and I had made a peace when I realized that it wasn't urging me to lie down and die, just critiquing my inadequate efforts to stay alive.

Religion and ethics were not always—or even frequently—mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often reflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice.

Thomas Blanky wondered if he had been an instrument of evil — or perhaps just of folly — when he had used his more than three decades of ice-master skills to get 126 men the impossible 250 miles through ice to this place where all they could do was die

Abraham was testing God. By denying the sacrifice at the last moment, by stopping the knife, God had earned the right—in Abraham's eyes and the hearts of his offspring—to become the God of Abraham.

In the beginning was the Word. In the end…past honor, past life, past caring… In the end will be the Word.

Who knows what the Ousters will do?" he said. "They no longer appear to be motivated by human logic." Martin Silenus laughed loudly, spilling his wine as he gestured. "As if we fucking humans were ever motivated by human logic!

Every time I believe I know one of these men or officers, I find that I am wrong. A million years of Man's Medicinal progress will never reveal the secret condition and sealed compartments of the Human soul.

she returned, trailing clouds of glory which quickly dissipated in the mundane flow of sensory trivia.

At that point Lord Agamemnon, Atreus' son, began shitting whole goats," laughs Orus, speaking loudly enough that several captains turn to frown at us.

ENOUGH! bellows Zeus and not only stops Ares diatribe , but freezes every god and robot in place. I'll hear no more whining prattle from you, Ares, you lying, two-faced, treacherous sparrowfart, you miserable excuse for a man, much less for a god.

From what Paul tells me," said the Monsignor, "the Consul was true to his convictions, faithful to the memory of his grandmother Siri.

If a man in a smoking jacket in a coal-fire-heated library in his manor house in London can understand that life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, then how can it be denied by a man pulling a sledge stacked with frozen meat and furs across an unnamed island, through the Arctic night under a sky gone mad, towards a frozen sea a thousand miles and more from any civilised hearth?

So many important things pass quickly without being understood at the time. So many powerful moments are buried beneath the absurd

The best lack all conviction," he thought, "while the worst are full of passionate intensity." Dur