Dan Simmons Quotes
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Human philosophy tends to shake down into values which might be categorizes as intellectual, religious, moral, and aesthetic.
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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 wish we had the technology to fight God on an equal basis,' he said in low, tight tones. 'To beard him in his den. To fight back for all of the injustices heaped on humanity. To allow him to alter his smug arrogance or be blown to hell.'
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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I realized that night the import and the terrible difficulty in the task ahead of me-in keeping this child safe from the sharp edges of a strange and indifferent universe.I think that is was on this alien and storm-tossed night that I first understood what it might be like to be a parent.
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It's odd how violence and humor so often go together, isn't it?
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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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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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If the universe has any soul, it is the soul of irony.
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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 future is never written...only penciled in.
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Words are the only bullets in truth’s bandolier. And poets are the snipers.
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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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Doing a life study while drunk and in the process of being seduced is never a formula for quality art.