Quotes from Dan Simmons

Meaning no disrespect, sir, but there's no way in the Good Lord's fucking universe that anyone can bar accidents or the unexpected.

The Song of Kali is with us. It has been with us for a very long time. Its chorus grows and grows and grows. But there are other voices to be heard. There are other songs to be sung.

Why does our species always have to take our full measure of God-given misery and terror and mortality and then make it worse?

Stand as I did after throwing the switch, a murderer, a betrayer, but still proud, feet firmly planted on Hyperion's shifting sand, head held high, fist raised against the sky, crying "A plague on both your houses!

The past is dead and buried. But I know now that buried things have a way of rising to the surface when one least expects them to.

The life of a poet lies not merely in the finite language-dance of expression but in the nearly infinite combinations of perception and memory combined with the sensitivity to what is perceived and remembered.

pain has been with him since birth - the universe's gift to a poet ...

Pain is the curl and foam of a wave that does not break.

THERE WILL BE NO FURTHER MISUSE OF THIS CHANNEL. YOU ARE DISTURBING OTHERS WHO ARE USING IT TO SERIOUS PURPOSE. ACCESS WILL BE RESTORED WHEN YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT IT IS FOR. GOODBYE

at that moment, the sum of the crowd's IQ was far below that of its most modest single member. Mobs have passions, not brains.

The essence of honor lay in the moment of combat between equals.

It has been my experience that immediately after certain traumatic separations—leaving one's family to go to war, for instance, or upon the death of a family member, or after parting from one's beloved with no assurances of reunion—there is a strange calmness, almost a sense of relief, as if the worst has happened and nothing else need be dreaded.

When you've spent thirty years entering rooms filled with strangers you feel less pressure than when you've had only half that number of years of experience. You know what the room and the people in it probably hold for you and you go looking for it. If it's not there, you sense it earlier and leave to go about your business. You just know more about what is, what isn't, and how little time there is to learn the difference.

Quality wine, Scotch, and coffee had been the three irreplaceable commodities after the death of Old Earth.

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.

The Ice Master was too injured and too exhausted to crawl any farther. Let whatever was going to happen to him happen now and may a Sailor's God fuck to Hell this fucking thing that was going to eat him.

People always pay a lot of money for things that make them stupid.

And above it all the butterfly effect. The sure knowledge that the entire life of a human being is like a single day in that human's life: unplannable, unpredictable, governed by the hidden tides of chaotic factors and buffered by butterfly wings...

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.

No lifetime is long enough for those who wish to create, Raul. Or for those who simply wish to understand themselves and their lives. It is, perhaps, the curse of being human, but also a blessing.

There would be no more offerings. Not this day. Not any day. Humankind had suffered enough for its love of gods, its long search for God. He thought of the many centuries in which his people, the Jews, had negotiated with God, complaining, bickering, decrying the unfairness of things but always - always - returning to obedience at whatever the cost. Generations dying in the ovens of hatred. Future generations scarred by the cold fires of radiation and renewed hatred.

My intellect was my greatest vanity.

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. Probably, I say. But then, what isn't?

Love was as hardwired into the structure of the universe as gravity and matter.