Top 128 Quotes & Sayings by Dan Simmons

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

But it's not just a game of finding literary references.

The truth is, it's not a great career move to create a readership and then, in effect, abandon them.

As for the depiction of the Catholic church, it's not meant to be a prediction.

It's odd how violence and humor so often go together, isn't it?

Movie SF is, by definition, dumbed down - there have only been three or four SF movies in the history of film that aspire to the complexity of literary SF.

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

But I think, and hope, that the novels can be understood and enjoyed as science fiction, on their own terms.

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.

There's a unique bond of trust between readers and authors that I don't believe exists in any other art form; as a reader, I trust a novelist to give me his or her best effort, however flawed.

No one inspired me to write, but writer Harlan Ellison terrified me into getting published.

I knew that I wanted to be a writer even before I knew exactly what being a writer entailed.

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

It's one of the strangest attributes of this profession that when we writers get exhausted writing one thing, we relax by writing another.

Life doesn't retreat.

Words are the light and sound of our existence, the heat lightning by which the night is illuminated.

There is a fullness and calmness there which can come only from knowing pain.

Pain is an interesting and off-putting thing. Few if any things in life concentrate our attention so completely and terribly, and few things are more boring to listen to or read about.

If our god's work is to be done in our time, we must do it ourselves.

There is no doubt that I have discovered the ultimate in stagnant human societies. The Bikura have realized the human dream of immortality and have paid for it with their humanity and their immortal souls.

The powerful have received their share of the world's attention even when their power has been shown as sheer evil. The victim's remain the faceless masses. Numbers. Mass graves. These monsters have fertilized our century with the mass graves of their victims and it is time that the powerless had names and faces -- and voices.

No book or poem is ever finished, merely abandoned.

I know what cancer was. How is it like humankind?" Sek Hardeen's perfectly modulated, softly accented tones showed a hint of agitation. "We have spread out through the galaxy like cancer cells through a living body, Duré. We multiply without thought to the countless life forms that must die or be pushed aside so that we may breed and flourish. We eradicate competing forms of intelligent life.

Mystery. The strangeness of place so necessary to some creative spirits. A perfect mixture of the classical utopia and the pagan mystery.

Any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principal which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being evil.

A token of ecological awareness in a society devoted to self destruction and waste but unwilling to acknowledge its indulgent ways.

Wilkie Collins was a rival and competitor of Dickens. His novel Moonstone sold more copies at the time than Dickens' last two books. But that meant nothing in the long run. Right now, to be honest, Wilkie Collins is what he deserved to be back then: a footnote, an almost lost memory. And he knew he would become that.

She had always felt that the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unself-conscious flow of little things - the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossings and connections casual, dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal.

The beauty of that June day was almost staggering. After the wet spring, everything that could turn green had outdone itself in greenness and everything that could even dream of blooming or blossoming was in bloom and blossom. The sunlight was a benediction. The breezes were so caressingly soft and intimate on the skin as to be embarrassing.

I think all the simple things can and do still work - holding your child's hand while walking across the street will do it. But we can hardly hear it for all the noise which has turned love into a cliche, and most people can't even hear John Lennon's "All You Need Is Love" anymore without wincing.

Fate and victory shift ... now this way, now that way -- like a line of unarmored men under a hail of enemy arrows.

In the end--when all else is dust--loyalty to those we love is all we can carry with us to the grave. Faith--true faith--was trusting in that love.

The sum of the crowd's IQ was far below that of its most modest single member. Mobs have passions, not brains.

Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.

Love was as hardwired into the structure of the universe as gravity and matter.

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.

The Great Change is when humankind accepts its role as part of the natural order of the universe instead of its role as a cancer

Stupidity has a price and it always gets paid.

Love is nothing but lust misspelled.

Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers.

Each heart has its graveyard, each household its dead, And knells ring around us wherever we tread, And the feet that awhile made our pathway so bright Pass on to a land that is out of our sight.

We are all eaters of souls.

Artists recognize other artists as soon as the pencil begins to move.

Belief in one's identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one's immortality... and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.

Nothing helps an artist's career more than a little death and obscurity.

Sometimes ... dreams are all that separate us from the machines.

Its hard to die. Harder to live

Most of us do know we have no immortality. And when you've found a genius, someone who has already purchased his immortality in musical or literary terms, it's maddening.

Context is to data what water is to a dolphin

The shortest route to courage is absolute ignorance.

In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure.

In such seconds of decision entire futures are made.

As for the depiction of the Catholic church, it's not meant to be a prediction

I now understand the need for faith - pure, blind, fly-in-the-face-of-reason faith - as a small life preserver in the wild and endless sea of a universe ruled by unfeeling laws and totally indifferent to the small, reasoning beings that inhabit it.

The past is dead and buried. But I know now that buried things have a way of rising to the surface when one least expects them to.

You have to live to really know things, my love

If everyone could understand the working of a psychopath's mind, we undoubtedly would be closer to insanity ourselves.

It occurs to me that our survival may depend upon our talking to one another.

The love of violence is an aspect of our humanity. Even the weak wish to be strong primarily so they can wield the whip.

I knew that I wanted to be a writer even before I knew exactly what being a writer entailed