Dan simmons quotes

Context is to data what water is to a dolphin

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

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.

When I get about five readers I can rub together in one genre, I leave that genre and go somewhere else. And this is due to a vow that I made myself when I started writing - that if I had any success at all, I would not be bound to one form of writing. That I would write what moves me. The only way I can see me surviving and doing more than one book is to present the readers with a Dan Simmons novel, with whatever tropes and protocols from whatever genre I want to borrow them. If that builds a Dan Simmons readership, well then, okay. Otherwise, forget about it. I'd rather drive a truck.

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.

The whole planet reeks of mysticism without revelation.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

You've probably heard about the theory of steam-engine time - that even after the steam engine had been invented, it had to wait until people were ready to make use of it. The same thing happens in literary circles. The truth is, I'm not terribly interested in Victorian times; I'm interested in Victorian writers. I'm interested in most eras of history, but not the Victorian Era especially. I was interested in the John Franklin Expedition. I was interested in these last five weird years of Dickens' life. And I just have to take the age that comes with all that when I write about it.

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.

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

The Victorians, they were like the Germans in World War II. They could not stop recording details about their lives and their age.

You have to live to really know things, my love

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.

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.

Power: a currency that never went out of style.

Life doesn't retreat.

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.

We are all eaters of souls.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

In such seconds of decision entire futures are made.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

The never-ending competition between writers hasn't changed between 1868 and 2000. I used to belong to writers' workshops with other professionals, but that becomes impossible after a while. Everyone's on a different step of the career ladder. Jealousy doesn't have to erupt into murder and burying someone in Wells Cathedral, but it is always there.

Mobs have passions, not brains.

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.

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.

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

No book or poem is ever finished, merely abandoned.

Lovemaking seems all too absurd when described.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

There are many other writers whose work I admire tremendously, but none whose work struck me at just the right young age. Jack Vance taught me that speculative fiction, science fiction, could be wonderfully and liberatingly stylistic. It didn't have to be pulp stuff. He really changed my writing and my view of science fiction, so if nothing else, my little homage to him in the novelette I wrote for that anthology is my thank-you to him. He helped me see that any genre can have excellent writing in it.

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

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

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.

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.

Love is nothing but lust misspelled.

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

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

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".

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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?

The best advice that an accomplished writer could give a beginning writer is probably, "Find your slide and then grease it." Almost every writer that wants a rewarding career, in terms of money and status and number of readers, finally finds a certain genre or certain style that he or she sticks with until reaching a critical mass of readership. And I've violated this from the get-go.

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

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

Stupidity has a price and it always gets paid.

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.

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

The shortest route to courage is absolute ignorance.

Its hard to die. Harder to live