Dan Simmons Quotes

These were not religious fanatics, I saw, not mindless servants or self-punishing ascetics, but were, instead, row upon row of intelligent, questioning, alert young men and women.

If there is a true secret to the universe, it is this...these first few seconds of warmth and entry and complete acceptance by one’s beloved.

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.”

“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.

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.

While I was obsessed with my own misery, there were other things occurring in the human universe.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

The lieutenant took his time scanning their visa chips, letting them wait in the drizzle, occasionally making a comment with the idle arrogance common to such nobodies who have just come into a small bit of power.

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

What was the Depression?
Bad economic times in their pure capitalist nation-state, Aenea said. Remember, the economy wasn't really global then, and it depended upon private money institutions called banks, gold reserves, and the value of physical money—actual coins and pieces of paper that were supposed to be worth something. It was all a consensual hallucination, of course, and in the 1930s, the hallucination turned nightmare.