Quotes from Dan Simmons

Mark Twain once opined in his homey way: "The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.

This is every writer's nightmare--the sudden breakdown of meaning in the language that sustains and supports us...

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 ... that consciousness can evolve to a plane more benevolent than its counterpoint of a universe hardwired to indifference.

Sol Weintraub suddenly understood perfectly why Abraham had agreed to sacrifice Isaac, his son, when the Lord commanded him to do so. It was not obedience. It was not even to put the love of God above the love of his son. 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. Sol

But, Dad…" She hesitated. "It will mean raising me all over again. It means suffering through my childhood for a third time. No parent should be asked to do that." Sol managed a smile. "No parent would refuse that, Rachel.

a society devoted to self-destruction and waste but unwilling to acknowledge its indulgent ways.

The whole planet reeks of mysticism without revelation.

all good things beyond sleep come precisely because we defy gravity while we live.

Context is to data what water is to a dolphin

God is the creature, not the creator.

Men who read a lot have a more sensitive disposition, added Fowler. [...] I did not know what to say to this. Maybe reading is a sort of curse is all I mean, concluded Fowler. Maybe it's better for a man to stay inside his own mind. Amen, I felt like saying, although I do not know why.

But as with so many things in our lives, the reason for doing something is not the important thing. It is the fact of doing that remains.

Human art, Mahnmut knew, simply transcended human beings.

speaking as a novelist myself, I know that members of our profession live in our imaginations as much or more as we inhabit what people call 'the real world'...

He loved the darkness and the mystery of the Catholic service--the tall priest strutting like a carrion crow and pronouncing magic in a dead language, the immediate magic of the Eucharist bringing the dead back to life so that the faithful could devour Him and become of Him, the smell of incense and the mystical chanting.

Sol had not known he was lonely until he met Sarai.

What, after all, is more real to us than the geography of our childhoods?

The Chinese poet George Wu ... recorded on his comlog: Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become. Later, on his last disk to his lover the week before he died, Wu said: Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers.

The sunset was that long, achingly beautiful balance of stillness in which the sun seemed to hover like a red balloon above the western horizon, the entire sky catching fire from the death of day; a sunset unique to the American Midwest and ignored by most of its inhabitants. The twilight brought the promise of coolness and the certain threat of night.

His imagination was always more real than the reality of daily life.

The universe is indifferent to our fates. This was the crushing burden that the character took with him as he struggled through the surf toward survival or extinction. The universe just does not give a shit.

Goddamn fatherfucking asshole politician moral paraplegic dipshit drag-queen bitch!

The Great Change is when humankind accepts its role as part of the natural order of the universe instead of its role as a cancer

Religion and ethics were not always - or even frequently - mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often deflected 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.