Dan Simmons

“Context is to data what water is to a dolphin”

“... primitive times had required primitive obedience, that later generations evolved to the point where parents offered themselves as sacrifice - as in the dark knights of the ovens which pocked old earth history - and that current generations had to deny any command for sacrifice. Sol had written that whatever God now took in human consciousness - whether as a mere manifestation of the subconscious in all its revanchist needs or as a more conscious attempt at philosophical and ethical evolution - humankind could no longer agree to offer up sacrifice in God's name. Sacrifice and the agreement to sacrifice had written human history in blood.”

“Religion and ethics were not always - or even frequently - mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often deflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice.”

“If I should die," said I to myself, "I have left no immortal work behind me - nothing to make my friends proud of my memory - but I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember'd.”

“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”

“Its hard to die. Harder to live”

“Mobs have passions, not brains.”

“... pain has been with him since birth - the universe's gift to a poet ...”

“There would be no more offerings. Not this day. Not any day. Humankind had suffered enough for its love of gods, its long search for God. He thought of the many centuries in which his people, the Jews, had negotiated with God, complaining, bickering, decrying the unfairness of things but always - always - returning to obedience at whatever the cost. Generations dying in the ovens of hatred. Future generations scarred by the cold fires of radiation and renewed hatred.”

“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.”

“... a society devoted to self-destruction and waste but unwilling to acknowledge its indulgent ways.”

“Eagles are extinct," grumbled Morpurgo. "Perhaps they should have attacked the sky. It betrayed them.”

“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.”

“The world as we know it is ending, my friends, no matter what happens to us”

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

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

“You have to live to really know things, my love”

“When you've spent thirty years entering rooms filled with strangers you feel less pressure than when you've had only half that number of years of experience. You know what the room and the people in it probably hold for you and you go looking for it. If it's not there, you sense it earlier and leave to go about your business. You just know more about what is, what isn't, and how little time there is to learn the difference.”

“She [Beatrice] alone was still real for him, still implied meaning in the world, and beauty. Her nature became his landmark - what Melville would call, with more sobriety than we can now muster, his Greenwich Standard ...”

“The Chinese poet George Wu ... recorded on his comlog: "Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become." Later, on his last disk to his lover the week before he died, Wu said: "Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers.”

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

“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.”

“The essence of honor lay in the moment of combat between equals.”

“... a comment with the idle arrogance common of such nobodies who have just come into a small bit of power.”

“Even as he watched, a star moved above the limb of the planet, laser weapons winked their ruby morse”

“Commander Lebedev wrote—‘After a communication session we invited Flight Engineer Savitskaya to the heavily laden table. We gave Sveta a blue floral print apron and told her, “ ‘Look, Sveta, even though you are a pilot and cosmonaut, you are still a woman first. Would you please do us the honor of being our hostess tonight?’ ““Ouch,” says Roth”

“It is true that we Russians have sent only four doctors into space in forty years of flight, but still I might have had chance to fly to Mir or International Space Station except for one fact. This is that I cannot urinate—is this the right word, Mr. Roth?—I cannot urinate on wheel of bus.”

“Why . . .” she begins. “Why do you want to climb it?”“Because it’s there.”

“More climbers die during the descent than on the way up.”Karakaredes seems to be considering this. After a minute he says, “Yes, but here on the summit, there must be some ritual . . .”“Hero photos,” gasps Paul. “Gotta . . . have . . . hero photos.”Our alien nods. “Did . . . anyone . . . bring an imaging device? A camera? I did not.”

“Wasn’t ‘Ms.’ an honorific for females back in pre-rubicon days?” asked Frome. “Some sort of honorary degree for not getting married or something?”

“They . . . are . . . so. . . sorry, ” she whispered. “The machine brings back no . . . pictures . . . only the food and air and water. It is programmed . . . as you suggested, Dem Lia . . . to eliminate infestations. They are . . . so . . . so . . . sorry for the loss of Ouster life. They offer the suicide of . . . of their species . . . if it would atone for the destruction.”

“The Song of Kali is with us. It has been with us for a very long time. Its chorus grows and grows and grows. But there are other voices to be heard. There are other songs to be sung.”

“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 spermatoza 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 reveling cosmos. (Yes, our DNA is unique, but so is a salamander's. Yes, we construct artifacts, but so have species ranging from beavers to the architecture ants... Yes, we weave real fabric things from the dreamstuff of mathematics, but the universe is hardwired with arithmetic. Scratch a circle and pi peeps out. Enter a new solar system and Tycho Brahe's formulae lie waiting under the black velvet cloak of space/time. But where has the universe hidden a word under its outer layer of biology, geometry, or insensate rock?)”

“In such seconds of decision entire futures are made.”

“The cruciform does not like pain. Nor do I but, like the cruciform, I am willing to use it to serve my purposes. And I will do so consciously, not instinctively like the mindless mass of alien tissue embedded in me. This thing only seeks a mindless avoidance of death by any means. I do not wish to die, but I welcome pain and death rather than an eternity of mindless life. Life is sacred--I still hold to that as a core element of the Church's though and teachings these past twenty-eight hundred years when life has been so cheap--but even more sacred is the soul. I realize now that what I was trying to do with the Armaghast data was offer the Church not a rebirth but only a transition to a false life such as these poor walking corpses inhabit. If the Church is meant to die, it must do so--but do so gloriously, in the full knowledge of its rebirth in Christ. It must go into the darkness not willingly but well--bravely and firm of faith--like the millions who have gone before us, keeping faith with all those generations facing death in the isolated silence of death camps and nuclear fireballs and cancer wards and pogroms, going into the darkness, if not hopefully, then prayerful that there is some reason for it all, something worth the price of all that pain, all those sacrifices., All those before us have gone into the darkness without assurance of logic or fact or persuasive theory, with only a slender thread of hope or the all too shakable conviction of faith. And if they have been able to sustain that slim hope in the face of darkness, then so must I... and so must the Church.”

“Do you think it's ready?" I [Silenus, The Poet] asked. "It's perfect... a masterpiece.""Do you think it'll sell?" I asked. "No fucking way.”

“Blood and brain tissue clung to the wet rock like the refuse of a sad picnic.”

“And then Kassad was being helped out of his simulation creche at the Olympus Command School and the other cadets and instructors were rising, talking, laughing with one another--all seemingly unaware that the world had changed forever.”

“Failing tastes of bile and dog vomit. Shame on any man who gets used to that taste.”

“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.”

“I desperately want to talk to her now. I want to ask her who it was who so deftly crafted and shaped the legend that was our love.”

“Stand as I did after throwing the switch, a murderer, a betrayer, but still proud, feet firmly planted on Hyperion’s shifting sand, head held high, fist raised against the sky, crying “A plague on both your houses!”

“The shortest route to courage is absolute ignorance.”

“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.”

“To be a true poet is to become God.I tried to explain this to my friends on Heaven's Gate. 'Piss, shit,' I said. 'Asshole motherfucker, goddamn shit goddamn. Cunt. Pee-pee cunt. Goddamn!'They shook their heads and smiled, and walked away. Great poets are rarely understood in their own day.”

“They made love then. Kassad, at twenty-three standard years, had been in love once and had enjoyed sex many times. He thought he knew the way and the why of it. There was nothing in his experience to that moment which he could not have described with a phrase and a laugh to his squadmates in the hold of a troop transport. With the calm, sure cynicism of a twenty-three-year-old veteran he was sure that he would never experience anything that could not be so described, so dismissed. He was wrong. He could never adequately share the sense of the next few minutes with anyone else. He would never try.”

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

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

“Le disgustaba morir, y no quería morir más de lo necesario.”

“sounding now/old songs/deep water/no-Great Voices/no-Shark/old songs/new songs”