Quotes from Dan Simmons

nothing smells quite as wonderful as old books.

Ah, Dios mío, ojalá fuese yo uno de esos prisioneros de Southgate. Sus celdas, según requiere la ley y la humanidad, tienen el doble de tamaño que nuestros camarotes, James, y nuestro futuro sería cálido y seguro si no tuviésemos otra cosa que hacer que sentarnos en medio de todo ese lujo y esperar a que llegasen las noticias

I miei pensieri erano come mercurio... scivolavano sempre via, prima che potessi afferrarli o sagomarli in forma coerente.

My dear child," beamed Martin Silenus, "I am not trying to tell you anything. I just thought it might be entertaining—as well as edifying and enlightening—if at some point we exchanged lists of all the locations at which we have either robbed or been robbed. Since you have the unfair advantage of having been the daughter of a senator, I am sure that your list would be much more distinguished Ã¢â'¬Â¦ and much longer." Lamia

For years I have carried on silent conversations with Siri, framing questions to myself for future discussion with her, and it suddenly strikes me with cold clarity that we will never again sit together and talk. An emptiness begins to grow inside me. Should

I meant only to point out that in hopelessness there is always hope.

It was a wet and chilly late October morning in A.D. 1415. Kassad had been inserted as an archer into the army of Henry V of England.

Black man invented plasma. Fellow named Charles Drew. I read somewhere that he bled to death after a car accident in the nineteen fifties because some cracker North Carolina hospital didn't have any 'Negro blood' in the fridge and refused to give him 'white blood.

Yggdrasill—one of only five of its kind—into a war

Perhaps Nemes and her kind will keep it in a zoo to hunt it when they are bored.

He wished he were home in Charleston, listening to the Dave Brubeck Quartet on the stereo and reading Bruce Catton.

no nation was better at creating metaphors for itself than America; in this case, the vision of a beautiful, sane, safe, marble future that is all dream and no marble to sustain it.

I now understand the need for faith – pure, blind, fly-in-the-face-of-reason faith – as a small life preserver in the wild and endless sea of a universe ruled by unfeeling laws and totally indifferent to the small, reasoning beings that inhabit it. Day

Only humankind struggles and fails in becoming what it is. The reasons are many and complex, but all stem from the fact that we have evolved as one of the self-seeing organs of the evolving universe. Can the eye see itself?

I have a friend, said Baedecker, who said that there might be places of power. She thinks we could do worse than to spend our lives searching for them. What do you think?

But I bet it's more complicated than that. There're places of power—yeah—no doubt about that. But it's like we were talking about last night. You have to help make them. You have to be in the right place at the right time and know it. How do you know it? asked Baedecker. By dreaming about it but not thinking about it, Dave said.

Even places of power are useless unless you're prepared to bring something to them. And I don't mean just the things we brought—they're to the real sacrament what the lump of bread is to the Eucharist. Then, if you come away the same person you were, you know it wasn't really a place of power.

Being born again doesn't mean that you've arrived somewhere, said Dave. It means you're ready to start the trip. The pilgrimage to more places of power, the doomed quest to keep the people and things you love from being caught by the weeds and dragged under.

Don't go, Bobby, said my friend. It's not worth it.

I take my favorite and most promising lads to the theater," said [Sherlock] Holmes. "I'd say that if they were born into better circumstances many would have grown up to be MP's, but in truth most are too smart and too honest for Parliament.

had a television set until I sold it at the height of the Vietnam War. Those sanitized snippets of death—made distant by the camera's lens—meant nothing to me. But I believe it meant something to these cattle which surround me. When the war and the nightly televised body counts ended, they demanded more, more, and the movie screens and streets of this sweet and dying nation have provided it in mediocre, mob abundance. It is an addiction I know well.

pero sobre todo se basaban en el descubrimiento del siglo XX de que, en el fondo, todo es información. Datos. Consciencia. Materia. Energía. Todo es información.

I despair at the rise of modern violence. I truly give in to despair at times, that deep, futureless pit of despair which Hopkins called carrion comfort.

All humans feed on violence, on the small exercises of power over another, but few have tasted—as we have—the ultimate power.