Dan Simmons Quotes
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I loved almost everything about being a teacher, but I was an unusual teacher.
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My own guess is that it’s a myth fueled by the same hunger for superstitious verities that drives other religions.
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I realized that for this moment, nothing in the past mattered. Nothing terrible in the future mattered. What mattered was her skin against me, her hand holding me, the perfume of her hair and skin and the warmth of her breath against my chest. This was satori. This was truth.
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'One of the few benefits of the fall of civilization as we know it,' he says, 'is that there are private cellars with fine vintages everywhere one digs. It is not theft. It is archaeology.'
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The truth is, it's not a great career move to create a readership and then, in effect, abandon them.
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But it's not just a game of finding literary references.
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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.
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As for the depiction of the Catholic church, it's not meant to be a prediction.
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'Humanity has evolved-as far as it has evolved,' continued the old priest, 'with no thanks to its predecessors or itself. Evolution brings human beings. Human beings, through a long and painful process, bring humanity.''Empathy,' Aenea said softly.
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It started 25 years ago, when I was teaching elementary school in a small town in Missouri.
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No one inspired me to write, but writer Harlan Ellison terrified me into getting published.
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It's one of the strangest attributes of this profession that when we writers get exhausted writing one thing, we relax by writing another.
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Sol found their tracts the usual combination of double talk and navel lint-gathering common to most religions.
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There are no ghosts, my love. Death is final. The soul is that ineffable combination of memory and personality which we carry through life...when life departs, the soul also dies. Except for what we leave in the memory of those who loved us.
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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.
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'Perhaps our reservoir of spiritual faith has run out.''Perhaps it should have run out a long time ago,' I said sternly. 'Superstition has taken a terrible toll on our species. Wars...pogroms...resistance to logic and science and medicine...not to mention gathering power in the hands of people like those who run the Pax.'
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'Gold,' says the Consul, knowing that this is the only syllable that has held its power over the ages.
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I knew that I wanted to be a writer even before I knew exactly what being a writer entailed.
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Aenea smiled but her eyes still glistened. 'Humans have been waiting for Jesus and Yahweh and E. T. to save their asses since before they covered those asses with bearskins and came out of the cave,' she said. 'They’ll have to keep waiting. This is our business...our fight...and we have to take care of it ourselves.'
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In such seconds of decision entire futures are made.
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The universe is indifferent to our fates. This was the crushing burden that the character took with him as he struggled through the surf toward survival or extinction. The universe just does not give a shit.
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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.
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'The Core knows what Teilhard de Chardin and other sentimentalists refused to acknowledge: evolution is not progress, that there is no ‘goal’ or direction to evolution. Evolution is change. Evolution ‘succeeds’ if that change best adapts some leaf or branch of its tree of life to conditions of the universe.
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Human philosophy tends to shake down into values which might be categorizes as intellectual, religious, moral, and aesthetic.