Dan Simmons Quotations

Merely to live without a pain Is little gladness, little gain, Ah, welcome joy tho' mixt with grief-- The thorn-set flower that crowns the leaf.

Love is nothing but lust misspelled.

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

But it's not just a game of finding literary references.

I have more respect for The Iliad now than I've ever had, and I've always thought it was possibly the finest piece of literature there was.

You'll have no trouble finding it. You just can't miss it.

There's a unique bond of trust between readers and authors that I don't believe exists in any other art form; as a reader, I trust a novelist to give me his or her best effort, however flawed.

It is a mystery, and to tell the truth, I am intrigued by mysteries even if this is to be my last week of enjoying them. I would welcome some glimmer of understanding but, failing that, working on the puzzle will suffice.

I despair at the rise of modern violence. I truly give in to despair at times, that deep, futureless pit of despair.... I watch the American slaughterhouse, the casual attacks on popes, presidents, and uncounted others, and I wonder if there are many more out there with the Ability or if butchery has simply become the modern way of life.

I know what cancer was. How is it like humankind?" Sek Hardeen's perfectly modulated, softly accented tones showed a hint of agitation. "We have spread out through the galaxy like cancer cells through a living body, Duré. We multiply without thought to the countless life forms that must die or be pushed aside so that we may breed and flourish. We eradicate competing forms of intelligent life.

Want to talk about Shakespeare's sonnets?" asked Orphu of Io. Are you shitting me?" The moravecs loved the ancient human colloquial phrases, the more scatological the better. Yes," said Orphu. "I am most definitely shitting you, my friend.

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

All of our lives are governed by a certain degree of faith in bullshit.

Each heart has its graveyard, each household its dead, And knells ring around us wherever we tread, And the feet that awhile made our pathway so bright Pass on to a land that is out of our sight.

Nothing helps an artist's career more than a little death and obscurity.

It's odd how violence and humor so often go together, isn't it?

Mystery. The strangeness of place so necessary to some creative spirits. A perfect mixture of the classical utopia and the pagan mystery.

Poetry is only secondarily about words. Primarily, it is about truth. I dealt with the Ding an Sich, the substance behind the shadow, weaving powerful concepts, similes, and connections the way an engineer would raise a skyscraper with the whiskered-alloy skeleton being constructed long before the glass and plastic and chromaluminum appears.

She had always felt that the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unself-conscious flow of little things-the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossings and connections casual, dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal.

The pack of media brayed and bellowed outside the house for seven weeks. Sol realized then what he had known and forgotten about very small communities: they were frequently annoying, always parochial, sometimes prying on a one-to-one level, but never had they subscribed to the vicious legacy of the so-called "public's right to know".

Movie SF is, by definition, dumbed down - there have only been three or four SF movies in the history of film that aspire to the complexity of literary SF.

But I think, and hope, that the novels can be understood and enjoyed as science fiction, on their own terms.

Any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principal which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being evil.

Gass once wrote: "Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it." Here is the essence of mankind's creative genius: not the edifices of civilization nor the bang-flash weapons which can end it, but the words which fertilize new concepts like spermatozoa attacking an ovum. It might be argued that the Siamese twin infants of word/idea are the only contribution the human species can, will, or should make to the raveling cosmos.

There were reprints of American editorials. Liberals saw it as a resurgence of social protest and decried the discrimination, poverty, and hunger that had provoked it. Conservative columnists acidly pointed out that hungry people don't steal stereo systems first and called for a crackdown in law enforcement. All of the reasoned editorials sounded hollow in light of the perverse randomness of the event. It was as if only a thin wall of electric lighting protected the great cities of the world from total barbarism.

A hero. 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.

Anticlimax is, of course, the warp and way of things. Real life seldom structures a decent denouement.

Seduction... was both a science and art - a blend of skill, discipline, proximity, and opportunity. Mostly proximity.

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

...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'...

Belief in one's identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one's immortality... and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.

Luckily, even as a young man not yet become himself, John Bridgens had two things besides indecision that kept him from self-destruction - books and a sense of irony.

To see and feel one's beloved naked for the first time is one of life's 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.

Evolution brings human beings. Human beings, through a long and painful process, bring humanity.

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.

As long as my sixth graders showed an average improvement of five years, the principal and district pretty much left me alone to create my own curriculum and teach whatever I wanted

It started 25 years ago, when I was teaching elementary school in a small town in Missouri

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

I knew that I wanted to be a writer even before I knew exactly what being a writer entailed

The young remember most deeply.... When we are old and failing, it is the memories of childhood which can be summoned most clearly.

How could anyone stay sane with entire lifetimes stored in one human mind?

Human beings have only that confusing mass of chemically driven neurological storage to rely on. They're all subjective and emotion-tinged. How can they trust any of their memories?

Power: a currency that never went out of style.

Losing our ignorance can be dangerous because our ignorance is a shield.

It's one of the strangest attributes of this profession that when we writers get exhausted writing one thing, we relax by writing another.

No one inspired me to write, but writer Harlan Ellison terrified me into getting published.

The truth is, it's not a great career move to create a readership and then, in effect, abandon them.

Words are the light and sound of our existence, the heat lightning by which the night is illuminated.

God is found in this Life ... to wait for another is folly.

You treat violence as an aberration ... when in truth it is the norm. It is the very essence of the human condition.

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

Pain is an interesting and off-putting thing. Few if any things in life concentrate our attention so completely and terribly, and few things are more boring to listen to or read about.

Every age fraught with discord and danger seems to spawn a leader meant only for that age, a political giant whose absence, in retrospect, seems inconceivable when the history of that age is written.

Laws had a bad habit of being ignored or abrogated when societal push came to totalitarian shove.

If everyone could understand the working of a psychopath's mind, we undoubtedly would be closer to insanity ourselves.

We are not the only avatars of humanity. Once our computing machines achieved self-consciousness, they became part of this design.

Doing a life study while drunk and in the process of being seduced is never a formula for quality art.

No book or poem is ever finished, merely abandoned.

There is a certain solipsism to serious illness which claims all of one's attention as certainly as an astronomical black hole seizes anything unlucky enough to fall within its critical radius.

Books ... were merely nodes in a near-infinite matrix of information that exists in four dimensions, evolving toward the idea of the concept of the approximation of the shadow of Truth vertically through time as well as longitudinally through knowledge.

Lovemaking seems all too absurd when described.

Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.

In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure.

You have to live to really know things, my love

There is a fullness and calmness there which can come only from knowing pain.

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.

Mobs have passions, not brains.

Its hard to die. Harder to live

Context is to data what water is to a dolphin

Once evolution gets a good basic design, it tends to throw away the variants and concentrate on the near-infinite diversity within that design.

Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion

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.

A token of ecological awareness in a society devoted to self destruction and waste but unwilling to acknowledge its indulgent ways.

Stupidity has a price and it always gets paid.

The powerful have received their share of the world's attention even when their power has been shown as sheer evil. The victim's remain the faceless masses. Numbers. Mass graves. These monsters have fertilized our century with the mass graves of their victims and it is time that the powerless had names and faces -- and voices.

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

Religion seems to have always offered us that false duality ... the silences of infinite space or the cozy comfort of inner certainty.

The shortest route to courage is absolute ignorance.

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.

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

Once upon a time ... the only autonomous intelligences we humans knew of were us humans. We thought then that if humankind ever devised another intelligence that it would be the result of a huge project ... a great mass of silicon and ancient transistors and chips and circuit boards ... a machine with lots of networking circuits, in other words, aping-if you will pardon the expression-the human brain in form and function. Of course, AIs did not evolve that way. They sort of slipped into existence when we humans were looking the other way.

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

Words were like objects, making the idea more solid -- less a poisonous gas and more a ... cube of crystallized thought.

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

If our god's work is to be done in our time, we must do it ourselves.

The future is like smoke from a burning forest, waiting for the wind of specific events and personal courage to blow the sparks and embers of reality this way or that.

Life is brutal that way ... the loss of irrecoverable moments amid trivia and distraction.

All violence flows from the same source ... the need for power. Power is the only true morality ... the only deathless god, and the appetite for violence is its only commandment.

Life doesn't retreat.

If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include the truth of contact or be forever hollow.

In the end--when all else is dust--loyalty to those we love is all we can carry with us to the grave. Faith--true faith--was trusting in that love.

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

Barbarians, we call them, while all the while we timidly cling to our Web like Visigoths crouching in the ruins of Rome's faded glory and proclaim ourselves civilized.

The whole planet reeks of mysticism without revelation.

Sometimes ... dreams are all that separate us from the machines.

War must never be a condition but, rather, a temporary scourge which we suffer as a child does a fever, knowing that health follows the long night of pain and that peace is health.

History viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.

Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers.

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.

It no longer matters who consider themselves the masters of events. Events no longer obey their masters.