Dan Simmons Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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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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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In such seconds of decision entire futures are made.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Sol remembered the dream, remembered his daughter’s hug, and realized that in the end-when all else is dust-loyalty to those we love is all we can carry with us to the grave.
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We are created for precisely this sort of suffering. In the end, it is all we are, those limpid tide pools of self-consciousness between crashing waves of pain.
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These were not religious fanatics, I saw, not mindless servants or self-punishing ascetics, but were, instead, row upon row of intelligent, questioning, alert young men and women.
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Information is always to be treasured, Raul. It is behind only love and honesty in a person’s attempt to understand the universe.
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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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The future is never written...only penciled in.
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It's odd how violence and humor so often go together, isn't it?
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Doing a life study while drunk and in the process of being seduced is never a formula for quality art.
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The human mind gets used to strangeness very quickly if it does not exhibit interesting behavior.
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'Almost everything interesting in the human experience is the result of an individual experiencing, experimenting, explaining, and sharing,' said my young friend. 'A hive mind would be the ancient television broadcasts, or life at the height of the datasphere...consensual idiocy.'
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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.