Top 128 Quotes & Sayings by Dan Simmons - Page 2

You treat violence as an aberration ... when in truth it is the norm. It is the very essence of the human condition.

Merely to live without a pain Is little gladness, little gain, Ah, welcome joy tho' mixt with grief-- The thorn-set flower that crowns the leaf.

The problem with being passionately in love ... is that it deprives you of too much sleep.

... all good things beyond sleep come precisely because we defy gravity while we live.

If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include the truth of contact or be forever hollow.

Seduction... was both a science and art - a blend of skill, discipline, proximity, and opportunity. Mostly proximity.

All violence flows from the same source ... the need for power. Power is the only true morality ... the only deathless god, and the appetite for violence is its only commandment.

There is a certain solipsism to serious illness which claims all of one's attention as certainly as an astronomical black hole seizes anything unlucky enough to fall within its critical radius.

I despair at the rise of modern violence. I truly give in to despair at times, that deep, futureless pit of despair.... I watch the American slaughterhouse, the casual attacks on popes, presidents, and uncounted others, and I wonder if there are many more out there with the Ability or if butchery has simply become the modern way of life.

It no longer matters who consider themselves the masters of events. Events no longer obey their masters.

Nobody gets beyond a petroleum economy. Not while there's petroleum there.

The whole planet reeks of mysticism without revelation.

How could anyone stay sane with entire lifetimes stored in one human mind?

Anticlimax is, of course, the warp and way of things. Real life seldom structures a decent denouement.

Power: a currency that never went out of style.

Writing, Im convinced, should be a subversive activity - frowned on by the authorities - and not one cooed over and praised beyond common sense by some teacher.

This is every writer's nightmare - the sudden breakdown of meaning in the language that sustains and supports us.

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.

It is a mystery, and to tell the truth, I am intrigued by mysteries even if this is to be my last week of enjoying them. I would welcome some glimmer of understanding but, failing that, working on the puzzle will suffice.

Once evolution gets a good basic design, it tends to throw away the variants and concentrate on the near-infinite diversity within that design.

Luckily, even as a young man not yet become himself, John Bridgens had two things besides indecision that kept him from self-destruction - books and a sense of irony.

Mobs have passions, not brains.

All of our lives are governed by a certain degree of faith in bullshit.

Gass once wrote: "Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it." Here is the essence of mankind's creative genius: not the edifices of civilization nor the bang-flash weapons which can end it, but the words which fertilize new concepts like spermatozoa attacking an ovum. It might be argued that the Siamese twin infants of word/idea are the only contribution the human species can, will, or should make to the raveling cosmos.

Want to talk about Shakespeare's sonnets?" asked Orphu of Io. Are you shitting me?" The moravecs loved the ancient human colloquial phrases, the more scatological the better. Yes," said Orphu. "I am most definitely shitting you, my friend.

The future is like smoke from a burning forest, waiting for the wind of specific events and personal courage to blow the sparks and embers of reality this way or that.

Lovemaking seems all too absurd when described.

Pain and darkness have been our lot since the Fall of Man. But there must be some hope that we can rise to a higher level ... that consciousness can evolve to a plane more benevolent than its counterpoint of a universe hardwired to indifference.

Once upon a time ... the only autonomous intelligences we humans knew of were us humans. We thought then that if humankind ever devised another intelligence that it would be the result of a huge project ... a great mass of silicon and ancient transistors and chips and circuit boards ... a machine with lots of networking circuits, in other words, aping-if you will pardon the expression-the human brain in form and function. Of course, AIs did not evolve that way. They sort of slipped into existence when we humans were looking the other way.

As long as my sixth graders showed an average improvement of five years, the principal and district pretty much left me alone to create my own curriculum and teach whatever I wanted

Speaking as a novelist myself, I know that members of our profession live in our imaginations as much or more as we inhabit what people call 'the real world.

God is found in this Life ... to wait for another is folly.

Losing our ignorance can be dangerous because our ignorance is a shield.

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

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.

We are not the only avatars of humanity. Once our computing machines achieved self-consciousness, they became part of this design.

Religion seems to have always offered us that false duality ... the silences of infinite space or the cozy comfort of inner certainty.

War must never be a condition but, rather, a temporary scourge which we suffer as a child does a fever, knowing that health follows the long night of pain and that peace is health.

Barbarians, we call them, while all the while we timidly cling to our Web like Visigoths crouching in the ruins of Rome's faded glory and proclaim ourselves civilized.

History viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.

I loved almost everything about being a teacher, but I was an unusual teacher

Books ... were merely nodes in a near-infinite matrix of information that exists in four dimensions, evolving toward the idea of the concept of the approximation of the shadow of Truth vertically through time as well as longitudinally through knowledge.

Life is brutal that way ... the loss of irrecoverable moments amid trivia and distraction.

The young remember most deeply.... When we are old and failing, it is the memories of childhood which can be summoned most clearly.

A hero. You want to be one of those rare human beings who make history, rather than merely watch it flow around them like water around a rock.

The pack of media brayed and bellowed outside the house for seven weeks. Sol realized then 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".

Evolution brings human beings. Human beings, through a long and painful process, bring humanity.

Laws had a bad habit of being ignored or abrogated when societal push came to totalitarian shove.

There were reprints of American editorials. Liberals saw it as a resurgence of social protest and decried the discrimination, poverty, and hunger that had provoked it. Conservative columnists acidly pointed out that hungry people don't steal stereo systems first and called for a crackdown in law enforcement. All of the reasoned editorials sounded hollow in light of the perverse randomness of the event. It was as if only a thin wall of electric lighting protected the great cities of the world from total barbarism.

Human beings have only that confusing mass of chemically driven neurological storage to rely on. They're all subjective and emotion-tinged. How can they trust any of their memories?

Every age fraught with discord and danger seems to spawn a leader meant only for that age, a political giant whose absence, in retrospect, seems inconceivable when the history of that age is written.

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

Poetry is only secondarily about words. Primarily, it is about truth. I dealt with the Ding an Sich, the substance behind the shadow, weaving powerful concepts, similes, and connections the way an engineer would raise a skyscraper with the whiskered-alloy skeleton being constructed long before the glass and plastic and chromaluminum appears.

Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion

What, after all, is more real to us than the geography of our childhoods?

His imagination was always more real than the reality of daily life.

I loved you backward and forward in time. I loved you beyond boundaries of time and space.

Words were like objects, making the idea more solid -- less a poisonous gas and more a ... cube of crystallized thought.

The life of a poet lies not merely in the finite language-dance of expression but in the nearly infinite combinations of perception and memory combined with the sensitivity to what is perceived and remembered.

It started 25 years ago, when I was teaching elementary school in a small town in Missouri