Dan Simmons Quotes
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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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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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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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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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Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.'
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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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'War does not call for judgment,' I said, 'merely survival.'
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Belief in one’s identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one’s immortality...and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.
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As is always the case when you are with the actual human being behind the celebrity or legend, there is something human about the man or woman that makes things less than myth.
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The Great Change is when humankind accepts its role as part of the natural order of the universe instead of its role as a cancer.
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Crudely effective, but wildly inefficient.
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If one is to observe, M. Endymion, one must be in the proper place to observe.
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It no longer matters who consider themselves the masters of events. Events no longer obey their masters.
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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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Those who ignore history’s lessons in the ultimate folly of war are forced to do more than relive them...they may be forced to die by them.
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It was a dramatization of total chaos, a functional definition of confusion, an unchoreographed dance of sad violence. It was war.
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'Sometimes,' said General Morpurgo, taking her hand, 'dreams are all that separate us from the machines.'
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I learned that poets aren’t God, but if there is a God...or anything approaching a God...he’s a poet. And a failed one at that.
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I realized then what I had known since I was a child watching my mother die of cancer-namely, that beyond ideology and ambition, beyond thought and emotion, there was only pain. And salvation from it.'