Dan Simmons Quotes

As for the depiction of the Catholic church, it's not meant to be a prediction

It occurs to me that our survival may depend upon our talking to one another.

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

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

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

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

Nobody gets beyond a petroleum economy. Not while there's petroleum there.

Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.

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

The shortest route to courage is absolute ignorance.

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

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.

Love is nothing but lust misspelled.

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

In such seconds of decision entire futures are made.

The love of violence is an aspect of our humanity. Even the weak wish to be strong primarily so they can wield the whip.

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

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

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

We are all eaters of souls.

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

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.

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

Most of us do know we have no immortality. And when you've found a genius, someone who has already purchased his immortality in musical or literary terms, it's maddening.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Fate and victory shift ... now this way, now that way -- like a line of unarmored men under a hail of enemy arrows.

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

Artists recognize other artists as soon as the pencil begins to move.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

You have to live to really know things, my love

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

The whole planet reeks of mysticism without revelation.

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

Its hard to die. Harder to live

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

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

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.