Dan Simmons Quotes
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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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If the universe has any soul, it is the soul of irony.
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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 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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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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'What?''Never mind. It will make sense when it comes about. All improbabilities do when probability waves collapse into event.'
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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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The future is never written...only penciled in.
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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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If there is a true secret to the universe, it is this...these first few seconds of warmth and entry and complete acceptance by one’s beloved.
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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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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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Never make unsupportable assumptions about your enemies, Martin. It can be a fatal self-indulgence.
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Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.
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I began to understand. 'A Faustian bargain...,' I said.'The Faustian bargain,' said the girl. 'All the church had to do to gain the universe was sell its soul.'
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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.
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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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Dogma and hierarchy are endemic to such structures...indeed, such are the structures of any theocracy.
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In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.
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The human mind gets used to strangeness very quickly if it does not exhibit interesting behavior.
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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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While I was obsessed with my own misery, there were other things occurring in the human universe.
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I heard the hiss and felt the blessed numbness spreading. If there is a God, I thought, it’s a painkiller.
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I don’t think that I want to make any wager if it means dealing with a Church that has grown so corrupt that it makes obedience and submission the price of its saving the life of someone’s child.