Dan Simmons quotes:

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Francis Crozier believes in nothing. Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. It has no plan, no point, no hidden mysteries that make up for the oh-so-obvious miseries and banalities. Nothing he has learned in the past six months has persuaded him otherwise.Has it?

As Ummon and the other Masters teach, it explains why the giraffe evolved a long neck but never why the other animals did not. It explains why humankind evolved to intelligence, but not why the tree near the front gate refused to.

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

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.

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

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

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

Love is nothing but lust misspelled.

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

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.

Achilles pauses, looks over his shoulder at the masses of men behind him, turns back, looks past Zeus toward Olympos and the masses of gods in front of him, and then crooks his neck to look up again at towering Zeus."Surrender now", says Achilles, "and we'll spare your goddesses' lives so they can be our slaves and courtesans."

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

He loved the darkness and the mystery of the Catholic service--the tall priest strutting like a carrion crow and pronouncing magic in a dead language, the immediate magic of the Eucharist bringing the dead back to life so that the faithful could devour Him and become of Him, the smell of incense and the mystical chanting.

My intellect was my greatest vanity.

The shortest route to courage is absolute ignorance.

In such seconds of decision entire futures are made.

In such seconds of decision entire futures are made

... you "met" this Moneta ... or whatever her real name is ... in her past but your future ... in a meeting that's still to come

In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.

Who are you, Hockenberry, to thwart Fate and defy the Will of the Gods?I am me, Thomas Hockenberry. I am fed up with these power-addled thugs who call themselves gods.

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

The whole planet reeks of mysticism without revelation.

At that moment I would have welcomed spider-rats nibbling on my toes about as much as the idea of chatting with a missionary priest.

It was as if they had climbed the last hill in creation.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

We are all eaters of souls.

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

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

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.

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.

Stupidity has a price and it always gets paid.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Lovemaking seems all too absurd when described.

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.

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.

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

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

Life doesn't retreat.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Its hard to die. Harder to live

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

Context is to data what water is to a dolphin

You have to live to really know things, my love

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

Mobs have passions, not brains.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

...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'...

No book or poem is ever finished, merely abandoned.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Power: a currency that never went out of style.

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?

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

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.

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

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