Dan Simmons Quotes

To see and feel one’s beloved naked for the first time is one of life’s pure, irreducible epiphanies. If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include that truth of contact or be forever hollow. To make love to the one true person who deserves that love is one of the few absolute rewards of being a human being, balancing all of the pain, loss, awkwardness, loneliness, idiocy, compromise, and clumsiness that go with the human condition. To make love to the right person makes up for a lot of mistakes.

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.”

Information is always to be treasured, Raul. It is behind only love and honesty in a person’s attempt to understand the universe.

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.

I ignore religions, said Brawne Lamia. I do not succumb to them.

Aenea smiled but her eyes still glistened. “Humans have been waiting for Jesus and Yahweh and E. T. to save their asses since before they covered those asses with bearskins and came out of the cave,” she said. “They’ll have to keep waiting. This is our business...our fight...and we have to take care of it ourselves.”

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

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.

The story of Rachel’s unique illness was no secret in Crawford, of course. The fact of it had spread through the college the first year of Rachel’s return and the entire town knew soon after. Crawford reacted in the fashion of small towns immemorial—some tongues wagged constantly, some people could not keep the pity and pleasure at someone else’s misfortune out of their voices and gazes—but mostly the community had folded its protective wings around the Weintraub family like an awkward mother bird shielding its young.

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.

Pascal's Wager never appealed to me. It seems logically...shallow.
Perhaps because it posits only two choices, said Aenea. Somewhere in the desert night, an owl made a short, sharp sound. Spiritual resurrection and immortality or death and damnation, she said.
Those last two aren't the same thing, I said.
No, but perhaps to someone like Blaise Pascal they were. Someone terrified of 'the eternal silence of these infinite spaces.'
A spiritual agoraphobic, I said.
Aenea laughed. The sound was so sincere and spontaneous that I could not help loving it. Her.
Religion seems to have always offered that false duality, she said, setting her cup of tea on a flat stone. The silences of infinite space or the cozy comfort of inner certainty.

If the universe has any soul, it is the soul of irony.

I was not surprised to wake up alive. I suppose one is surprised only when one awakens dead.

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.

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