Dan Simmons Quotes
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The future is never written...only penciled in.
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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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'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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The place was part museum, part library, and part archive; I loved it at first sight...and smell, for here there were thousands of printed books, many very old indeed, and nothing smells quite as wonderful as old books.
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If the universe has any soul, it is the soul of irony.
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Life is brutal that way...the loss of irrecoverable moments amid trivia and distraction.
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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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Dogma and hierarchy are endemic to such structures...indeed, such are the structures of any theocracy.
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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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There is something about raising a child that helps to sharpen one’s sense of what is real.
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Choose again.
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'And the sad fact is that all nanotech life out of our control-out of anyone’s control. The essence of nanotech life’s evolution is autonomy, self-will, and goals which have nothing to do with those of the harboring life form.''Humanity, you mean,' said Lourdusamy.'Precisely.'
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But I think, and hope, that the novels can be understood and enjoyed as science fiction, on their own terms.
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He knew what had to be done. It is not always the same as knowing what to do.
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Yes, our DNA is unique but so is a salamander’s.
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Words are the only bullets in truth’s bandolier. And poets are the snipers.
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Sol realized what he had known and forgotten about very small communities: they were frequently annoying, always parochial, sometimes prying on a one-to-one level, but never had they subscribed to the vicious legacy of the so-called 'public’s right to know.'
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I thought-To lose all this forever?And I hallucinated Aenea’s voice saying To lose all this forever is the essence of being human, my love.
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Never make unsupportable assumptions about your enemies, Martin. It can be a fatal self-indulgence.
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'What?''Never mind. It will make sense when it comes about. All improbabilities do when probability waves collapse into event.'
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Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.'
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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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Each of them was intimately aware of the procedure for electing a pope-not only of the antiquated mechanisms, of course, but of the politicking, pressuring, deal-making, bluffing, and outright blackmail that had often accompanied the process over the centuries.