Dan Simmons

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

“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 all too shakable convention of faith. And they have been able to sustain that slim hope in the face of darkness, then so must I.”

“The words sounded like a mournful incantation.”

“I wish we had the technology to fight God on an equal basis. To beard him in his den. To fight back for all of the injustices heaped on humanity. To allow him to alter his smug arrogance or be blown to hell.”

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

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

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

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

“Its hard to die. Harder to live”

“When the last autumn of Dickens's life was over, he continued to work through his final winter and into spring. This is how all of us writers give away the days and years and decades of our lives in exchange for stacks of paper with scratches and squiggles on them. And when Death calls, how many of us would trade all those pages, all that squandered lifetime-worth of painfully achieved scratches and squiggles, for just one more day, one more fully lived and experienced day? And what price would we writers pay for that one extra day spent with those we ignored while we were locked away scratching and squiggling in our arrogant years of solipsistic isolation?Would we trade all those pages for a single hour? Or all of our books for one real minute?”

“No lifetime is long enough for those who wish to create, Raul. Or for those who simply wish to understand themselves and their lives. It is, perhaps, the curse of being human, but also a blessing.”

“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 explained my opinion of the ship’s logic. “That is a strange designation,” said the ship. “While I have certain organic elements incorporated into my substructure and decentralized DNA computing components, I am not—in the strictest sense of the term—a biological organism. I have no digestive system. No need for elimination, other than the occasional waste gas and passenger effluvium. Therefore, I have no anus in either real or figurative terms. Therefore, I hardly believe I could qualify to be called an …” “Shut up,” I said.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“...Data itself... was tolerable. It was the constant nerve-web-expanding pain of context that would kill him.”

“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. Example: the Chinese pictogram for ‘integrity’ is a two-part symbol of a man literally standing next to his word. So far, so good. But what does the Late English word ‘honesty’ mean? Or ‘Motherland’? Or ‘progress’? Or ‘democracy’? Or ‘beauty’? But even in our self-deception, we become gods.”

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