Best 160 quotes of Dan Simmons on MyQuotes

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Context is to data what water is to a dolphin

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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?

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

I'm very interested in the evolution of technology, and it's really the idea of artificial life which intrigues me, more than just intelligence - a new, evolving life form arising within our datasphere and coming into living relation with humanity.

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.

In such seconds of decision entire futures are made.

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.

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.

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.

I think challenges are what any decent writer would be all about. If you actually do find your slide and grease it, shame on you. Me, I get bored very easily. As a writer I get bored even faster than I do in real life. I mean, I like fast cars; I've driven a lot of racecars. You need some stimulation. If I find something that seems too difficult to do, too difficult to research, or beyond your writing abilities, it's a perfect invitation to try it.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Life doesn't retreat.

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

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

Love is nothing but lust misspelled.

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