Dan Simmons Quotes
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In the beginning was the Word.In the end...past honor, past life, past caring...In the end will be the Word.
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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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De Soya blinks. 'Suicide is a mortal sin,' he says.On the screen the girl nods seriously. 'Yes,' she says, 'but I am not a Christian. Also, I'd rather go to hell than go with you.'
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After fifty-five years of dedicating his life and work to the story of ethical systems, Sol Weintraub had come to a single, unshakable conclusion: any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principal (sic) which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being was evil.
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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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The lieutenant took his time scanning their visa chips, letting them wait in the drizzle, occasionally making a comment with the idle arrogance common to such nobodies who have just come into a small bit of power.
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Christ may have lost his faith for a few seconds; He did not sell it in the marketplace for the trinkets of ego and curiosity.
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Twenty kilometers. At an average speed of 120 klicks per hour, we should cover the distance in ten minutes. Ten freezing, adrenaline-pumping, gorge-rising, terror-beating-against-the-ribs, react-in-a-microsecond-or-die seconds.
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Another friend, a child psychologist from the college, once commented that Rachel at age five showed the most reliable indicators of true giftedness in a young person: structured curiosity, empathy for others, compassion, and a fierce sense of fair play.
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Listen! There will be no more offerings, neither child nor parent. There will be no more sacrifices for anyone other than our fellow human. The time of obedience and atonement is past.
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'How about,' she said, 'that you do the logical thing because it’s the logical thing to do?'
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The human mind gets used to strangeness very quickly if it does not exhibit interesting behavior.
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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.
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Choose again.
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There is something about raising a child that helps to sharpen one’s sense of what is real.
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Religion and ethics were not always-or even frequently-mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often reflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice.
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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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Words are the only bullets in truth’s bandolier. And poets are the snipers.
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Have you considered that these prophecies were not divine revelations, but merely manipulation from some secular power?
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While I was obsessed with my own misery, there were other things occurring in the human universe.
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Thus evolved some members of the Core-not altruists, but desperate survivalists who realized that the only way ultimately to win their never-ending zero-sum game was to stop the game. And to stop the game they needed to evolve into a species capable of empathy.
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I was not surprised to wake up alive. I suppose one is surprised only when one awakens dead.
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'I am of no faith,' said Aenea. 'If one defines faith as belief in the supernatural.'
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'What?''Never mind. It will make sense when it comes about. All improbabilities do when probability waves collapse into event.'