Dan Simmons Quotes

“The Core knows what Teilhard de Chardin and other sentimentalists refused to acknowledge: evolution is not progress, that there is no ‘goal’ or direction to evolution. Evolution is change. Evolution ‘succeeds’ if that change best adapts some leaf or branch of its tree of life to conditions of the universe.

Doing a life study while drunk and in the process of being seduced is never a formula for quality art.

In the beginning was the Word.
In the end...past honor, past life, past caring...
In the end will be the Word.

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

I wish we had the technology to fight God on an equal basis, he said in low, tight tones. To beard him in his den. To fight back for all of the injustices heaped on humanity. To allow him to alter his smug arrogance or be blown to hell.

What?
Never mind. It will make sense when it comes about. All improbabilities do when probability waves collapse into event.

War does not call for judgment, I said, merely survival.

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.”

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

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.

No lifetime is long enough for those who wish to create, Raul. Or for those who simply wish to understand themselves and their lives. It is, perhaps, the curse of being human, but also a blessing.

If one is to observe, M. Endymion, one must be in the proper place to observe.

Listen! There will be no more offerings, neither child nor parent. There will be no more sacrifices for anyone other than our fellow human. The time of obedience and atonement is past.

The Void Which Binds is touched by all of us who have wept with happiness, bidden a lover good-bye, been exalted with orgasm, stood over the grave of a loved one, or watched our baby open his or her eyes for the first time.
Aenea is looking at me as she speaks, and I feel the gooseflesh rise along my arms.
The Void Which Binds is always under and above the surface of our thoughts and senses, she continues, invisible but as present as the breathing of our beloved next to us in the night. Its actual but unaccessible presence in our universe is one of the prime causes for our species elaborating myth and religion, for our stubborn, blind belief in extrasensory powers, in telepathy and precognition, in demons and demigods and resurrection and reincarnation and ghosts and messiahs and so many other categories of almost-but-not-quite satisfying bullshit.

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.