Dan Simmons Quotes

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.

The future is never written...only penciled in.

In such seconds of decision entire futures are made.

The universe is indifferent to our fates. This was the crushing burden that the character took with him as he struggled through the surf toward survival or extinction. The universe just does not give a shit.

Why am I seeking logic or sanity here? I'd asked myself at the moment. There hasn’t been any so far.

The human mind gets used to strangeness very quickly if it does not exhibit interesting behavior.

With a sudden clarity which went beyond the immediacy of his pain or sorrow, Sol Weintraub suddenly understood perfectly why Abraham had agreed to sacrifice Isaac, his son, when the Lord commanded him to do so.
It was not obedience.
It was not even to put the love of God above the love of his son.
Abraham was testing God.
By denying the sacrifice at the last moment, by stopping the knife, God had earned the right—in Abraham’s eyes and the hearts of his offspring—to become the God of Abraham.

I ached everywhere. It was hard to separate the dull agony of the shattered leg from the ache in my head and my back and my guts. My skull felt as if there were a ball of mercury in it that shifted ponderously long seconds after my head itself turned. The vertigo made me sick again, but I had nothing left to vomit. I hung on the tangle of branches and contemplated the glories of adventure.

There is something about raising a child that helps to sharpen one’s sense of what is real.

Sol found their tracts the usual combination of double talk and navel lint-gathering common to most religions.

Perhaps our reservoir of spiritual faith has run out.
Perhaps it should have run out a long time ago, I said sternly. Superstition has taken a terrible toll on our species. Wars...pogroms...resistance to logic and science and medicine...not to mention gathering power in the hands of people like those who run the Pax.

We know for a fact that the Buddha refused to speculate with his disciples on whether there was such a thing such as life after death. 'Such questions,' he said, 'are not relevant to the practice of the Path and cannot be answered while bound by the restraints of human existence.' Most of Buddhism, you see, gentlemen, can be explored, appreciated, and utilized as a tool toward enlightenment without descending into the supernatural.

It was a dramatization of total chaos, a functional definition of confusion, an unchoreographed dance of sad violence. It was war.

One of the few benefits of the fall of civilization as we know it, he says, is that there are private cellars with fine vintages everywhere one digs. It is not theft. It is archaeology.

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.