Quotes by Dan Simmons

Eagles are extinct, grumbled Morpurgo. Perhaps they should have attacked the sky. It betrayed them.

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.

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 truths bandolier. And poets are the snipers.

That’s what writers and artists and creators do, boy. Listen to the Void and try to hear dead folks’ thoughts. Feel their pain. The pain of living folks too. Finding a muse is just an artist or holy man’s way of getting a foot in the Void Which Binds’ front door. Aenea knew that. You should have too.

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.

If I should die, said I to myself, I have left no immortal work behind me - nothing to make my friends proud of my memory - but I have lovd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself rememberd.

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

The whole planet reeks of mysticism without revelation.

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

I loved you backward and forward in time. I loved you beyond boundaries of time and space.

At that moment I would have welcomed spider-rats nibbling on my toes about as much as the idea of chatting with a missionary priest.

For seven centuries the existence of Grand Unification Theories and hyperstring post-quantum physics and Core-given understanding of the universe as self-contained and boundless, without Big Bang singularities or corresponding endpoints, had pretty much eliminated any role of God—primitively anthropomorphic or sophisticatedly post-Einsteinian—even as a caretaker or pre-Creation former of rules. The modern universe, as machine and man had come to understand it, needed no Creator; in fact, allowed no Creator. Its rules allowed very little tinkering and no major revisions. It had not begun and would not end, beyond cycles of expansion and contraction as regular and self-regulated as the seasons on Old Earth

The Hegemony had known how to treat cancer, but most of the gene-tailoring knowledge and technology had been lost after the Fall.

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

My intellect was my greatest vanity.

I loved almost everything about being a teacher, but I was an unusual teacher.

Writing, Im convinced, should be a subversive activity - frowned on by the authorities - and not one cooed over and praised beyond common sense by some teacher.

“In such seconds of decision entire futures are made.”

“To see and feel ones beloved naked for the first time is one of lifes pure, irreducible epiphanies. If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include that truth of contact or be forever hollow. To make love to the one true person who deserves that love is one of the few absolute rewards of being a human being, balancing all of the pain, loss, awkwardness, loneliness, idiocy, compromise, and clumsiness that go with the human condition. To make love to the right person makes up for a lot of mistakes.”

“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.”