Dan Simmons quotes - page 5

Perhaps our reservoir of spiritual faith has run out.” "Perhaps it should have run out a long time ago,” I said sternly. "Superstition has taken a terrible toll on our species. Wars... pogroms... resistance to logic and science and medicine... not to mention gathering power in the hands of people like those who run the Pax. (Dan Simmons)
The modern universe, as machine and man had come to understand it, needed no Creator; in fact, allowed no Creator. Its rules allowed very little tinkering and no major revisions. It had not begun and would not end, beyond cycles of expansion and contraction as regular and self-regulated as the seasons on Old Earth. No room for love there. It seemed that Abraham had offered to murder his son to test a phantom. View quote
Dan Simmons
Listen! There will be no more offerings, neither child nor parent. There will be no more sacrifices for anyone other than our fellow human. The time of obedience and atonement is past. View quote
Dan Simmons
If the universe has any soul, it is the soul of irony. View quote
Dan Simmons
Dogma and hierarchy are endemic to such structures...indeed, such are the structures of any theocracy. View quote
Dan Simmons
The story of Rachel's unique illness was no secret in Crawford, of course. The fact of it had spread through the college the first year of Rachel's return and the entire town knew soon after. Crawford reacted in the fashion of small towns immemorial-some tongues wagged constantly, some people could not keep the pity and pleasure at someone else's misfortune out of their voices and gazes-but mostly the community had folded its protective wings around the Weintraub family like an awkward mother bird shielding its young. View quote
Dan Simmons
"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. View quote
Dan Simmons
While I was obsessed with my own misery, there were other things occurring in the human universe. View quote
Dan Simmons
The human mind gets used to strangeness very quickly if it does not exhibit interesting behavior. View quote
Dan Simmons
War does not call for judgment,” I said, "merely survival. View quote
Dan Simmons
There is no guarantee of happiness, wisdom, or long life if you drink of me this evening,” she says, very softly. There is no nirvana. There is no salvation. There is no afterlife. There is no rebirth. There is only immense knowledge-of the heart as well as the mind-and the potential for great discoveries, great adventures, and and a guarantee of more of the pain and terror that make up so much of our short lives. (Dan Simmons)
If our society ever opted for Orwell's Big Brother approach, the instrument of choice for oppression would have to be the credit wake. In a totally noncash economy with only a vestigial barter black market, a person's activities could be tracked in real time by monitoring the credit wake of his or her universal card. There were strict laws protecting card privacy but laws had a bad habit of being ignored or abrogated when societal push came to totalitarian shove. View quote
Dan Simmons
Never make unsupportable assumptions about your enemies, Martin. It can be a fatal self-indulgence. View quote
Dan Simmons
As is always the case when you are with the actual human being behind the celebrity or legend, there is something human about the man or woman that makes things less than myth. View quote
Dan Simmons
Yes, our DNA is unique but so is a salamander's. View quote
Dan Simmons
The Void Which Binds is touched by all of us who have wept with happiness, bidden a lover good-bye, been exalted with orgasm, stood over the grave of a loved one, or watched our baby open his or her eyes for the first time. View quote
Dan Simmons
Pascal's Wager never appealed to me. It seems logically...shallow. View quote
Dan Simmons
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. View quote
Dan Simmons
I knew that I wanted to be a writer even before I knew exactly what being a writer entailed. View quote
Dan Simmons
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. View quote
Dan Simmons
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. (Dan Simmons)