Dan Simmons Quotes
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Choose again.
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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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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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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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Life is brutal that way...the loss of irrecoverable moments amid trivia and distraction.
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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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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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The future is never written...only penciled in.
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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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'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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'What?''Never mind. It will make sense when it comes about. All improbabilities do when probability waves collapse into event.'
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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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Never make unsupportable assumptions about your enemies, Martin. It can be a fatal self-indulgence.
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Dogma and hierarchy are endemic to such structures...indeed, such are the structures of any theocracy.
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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 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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It struck me that his dialect was actually the nondialect of someone who has learned a new language perfectly but without the lazy shortcuts of someone born to it.
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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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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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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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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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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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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.