Dan Simmons Quotes
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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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There is something about raising a child that helps to sharpen one’s sense of what is real.
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Life is brutal that way...the loss of irrecoverable moments amid trivia and distraction.
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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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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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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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Dogma and hierarchy are endemic to such structures...indeed, such are the structures of any theocracy.
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'I am of no faith,' said Aenea. 'If one defines faith as belief in the supernatural.'
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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.
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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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While I was obsessed with my own misery, there were other things occurring in the human universe.
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The human mind gets used to strangeness very quickly if it does not exhibit interesting behavior.
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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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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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Never make unsupportable assumptions about your enemies, Martin. It can be a fatal self-indulgence.
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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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'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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Have you considered that these prophecies were not divine revelations, but merely manipulation from some secular power?
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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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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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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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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.