Dan Simmons Quotes

No book or poem is ever finished, merely abandoned.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Stupidity has a price and it always gets paid.

Life doesn't retreat.

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

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

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

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.

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

The problem with being passionately in love ... is that it deprives you of too much sleep.

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.

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.

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

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

Lovemaking seems all too absurd when described.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Power: a currency that never went out of style.

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?

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

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.

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

Mobs have passions, not brains.

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

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

The Victorians, they were like the Germans in World War II. They could not stop recording details about their lives and their age.

...Data itself... was tolerable. It was the constant nerve-web-expanding pain of context that would kill him.

They lay together in a sheltered place among the ruins of Brasilia while deathbeams from Chinese EMVs played like blue searchlights on broken ceramic walls.

... The continuation of her life was more than another day of breathing, but was the gift of another day of engagement with her beloved across the spectrum of all things.

Who are you, Hockenberry, to thwart Fate and defy the Will of the Gods?I am me, Thomas Hockenberry. I am fed up with these power-addled thugs who call themselves gods.

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.

In such seconds of decision entire futures are made

... you "met" this Moneta ... or whatever her real name is ... in her past but your future ... in a meeting that's still to come

The words sounded like a mournful incantation.

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

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