Dan Simmons Quotes
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One of the men in the boat-I could not remember which character-had moved through all of the circles of theological supposition: praying, believing that God was a merciful Deity who sat up nights worrying about him, then believing that God was a cruel bastard, and finally deciding that no one was listening.
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It's odd how violence and humor so often go together, isn't it?
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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 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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Words are the only bullets in truth’s bandolier. And poets are the snipers.
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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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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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I could not do this, I realized, if I were immortal. This degree of love of life and of one another is granted, I saw for once and for ever, not to immortals, but to those who live briefly and always under the shadow of death and loss.
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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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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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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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Doing a life study while drunk and in the process of being seduced is never a formula for quality art.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Choose again.
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Yes, our DNA is unique but so is a salamander’s.
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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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Life is brutal that way...the loss of irrecoverable moments amid trivia and distraction.