Quotes from Dan Simmons

You want to be a hero," he repeated. "You want to be one of those rare human beings who make history, rather than merely watch it flow around them like water around a rock.

There is something about raising a child that helps to sharpen one's sense of what is real.

Those who ignore history's lessons in the ultimate folly of war are forced to do more than relive them Ã¢â'¬Â¦ they may be forced to die by them.

Be assured, I do not suffer from a sense of humor.

I discovered what a mental stimulant physical labor could be; not mere physical labor, I should add, but absolutely spine-bending, lung-racking, gut-ripping, ligament-tearing, and ball-breaking physical labor. But as long as the task is both onerous and repetitive, I discovered, the mind is not only free to wander to more imaginative climes, it actually flees to higher planes.

Odd how the daily imperatives persist even in the face of collective disaster.

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

The young remember most deeply

I could not do this, I realized, if I were immortal. This degree of love of life and of one another is granted, I saw for once and for ever, not to immortals, but to those who live briefly and always under the shadow of death and loss.

The universe just does not give a shit.

Failing tastes of bile and dog vomit. Shame on any man who gets used to that taste.

I know the fucking Bible, and there ain't no fucking Book of Leviathan.

Siri whispered an answer to my unasked question. No, Merin, one is never really too old. At least not too old to want the warmth and closeness. You decide, my love. I will be content either way. I decided. Towards the dawn we slept.

Entropy is a bitch

Where religious values might be relative, intellectual values fleeting, moral values ambiguous, and aesthetic values dependent upon an observer, the existence value of any thing is infinite—thus the "mountains in the sun"—and being infinite, equal to every other thing and all truths.

Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. It has no plan, no point, no hidden mysteries that make up for the oh-so-obvious miseries and banalities.

I remember that day in early May after Le Vesconte's and Private Pilkington's brief joint burial service, one of the men suggested that we name the small spur of land where they were buried Le Vesconte Point, but Captain Crozier vetoed that idea, saying that if we named every place where one of us might end up buried after the dead person there, we'd run out of land before we ran out of names.

The only true voyage, the only Fountain of Youth," recited Orphu, "would be found not in traveling to strange lands but in having different eyes, in seeing the universe with the eyes of another person, of a hundred others, and seeing the hundred universes each of them sees, which each of them is.

Thus evolved some members of the Core—not altruists, but desperate survivalists who realized that the only way ultimately to win their never-ending zero-sum game was to stop the game. And to stop the game they needed to evolve into a species capable of empathy.

She [Beatrice] alone was still real for him, still implied meaning in the world, and beauty. Her nature became his landmark - what Melville would call, with more sobriety than we can now muster, his Greenwich Standard ...

The world as we know it is ending, my friends, no matter what happens to us

He was, in other words, a careful man with careless impulses.

The captain of HMS Terror often thought that he knew nothing about the future - other than that his ship and Erebus would never again steam or sail - but then he reminded himself of one certainty: when his store of whiskey was gone, Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier was going to blow his brains out.

sounding now/old songs/deep water/no-Great Voices/no-Shark/old songs/new songs