“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.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Hyperion
“It occurs to me that our survival may depend upon our talking to one another.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Hyperion
“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.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Hyperion
“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.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Hyperion
“Evolution brings human beings. Human beings, through a long and painful process, bring humanity.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Hyperion
“In such seconds of decision entire futures are made.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Hyperion
“After fifty-five years of dedicating his life and work to the story of ethical systems, Sol Weintraub had come to a single, unshakable conclusion: any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principal which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being was evil.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Hyperion
“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.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Hyperion
“There is a fullness and calmness there which can come only from knowing pain.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Hyperion
“Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Hyperion
“Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Hyperion
“Sarai had treasured every stage of Rachel's childhood, enjoying the day-to-day normalcy of things; a normalcy which she quietly accepted as the best of life. 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.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Hyperion
“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.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Hyperion
“You have to live to really know things, my love”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Hyperion
“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.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Hyperion
“The day is perfect and I hate it for being so.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Hyperion
“A philosopher/mathematician named Bertrand Russell who lived and died in the same century as 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 spermatazoa attacking an ovum.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Hyperion
“Who was Hitler?' I said.
Tyrena smiled slightly. 'An Old Earth politician who did some writing.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Hyperion
“It no longer matters who consider themselves the masters of events. Events no longer obey their masters.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Hyperion
“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.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Hyperion
“[H]istory viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Hyperion
“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.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Hyperion
“Nobody gets beyond a petroleum economy. Not while there's petroleum there.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Hyperion
“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.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Hyperion
“The whole planet reeks of mysticism without revelation.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Hyperion
“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!”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Hyperion
“... a comment with the idle arrogance common of such nobodies who have just come into a small bit of power.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Hyperion
“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.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Hyperion
“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.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Hyperion
“The world as we know it is ending, my friends, no matter what happens to us”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Hyperion
Dan Simmons
Born place: in Peoria, Illinois, The United States
Born date April 4, 1948
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“Grandma Julie’s parents didn’t come to their wedding. Grandpa Byron says they were too busy, but that seems odd to me. Perhaps they were racists and didn’t like her marrying Grandpa Byron. Everyone was a racist in 1972, apparently.”
― quote from Time Travelling with a Hamster
“Something Rich and Strange
She takes a step and the water rises higher on her knees. Four more steps, she tells herself. Just four more and I'll turn back. She takes another step and the bottom is no longer there and she is being shoved downstream and she does not panic because she has passed the Red Cross courses. The water shallows and her face breaks the surface and she breathes deep. She tries to turn her body so she won' t hit her head on a rock and for the first time she's afraid and she's suddenly back underwater and hears the rush of water against her ears. She tries to hold her breath but her knee smashes against a boulder and she gasps in pain and water pours into her mouth. Then for a few moments the water pools and slows. She rises coughing up water, gasping air, her feet dragging the bottom like an anchor trying to snag waterlogged wood or rock jut and as the current quickens again she sees her family running along the shore and she knows they are shouting her name though she cannot hear them and as the current turns her she hears the falls and knows there is nothing that will keep from it as the current quickens and quickens and another rock smashes against her knee but she hardly feels it as she snatches another breath and she feels the river fall and she falls with it as water whitens around her and she falls deep into the whiteness and she rises her head scrapes against a rock ceiling and the water holds her there and she tells herself don't breathe but the need rises inside her beginning in the upper stomach then up through her chest and throat and as that need reaches her mouth her mouth and nose open and the lungs explode in pain and then the pain is gone as bright colors shatter around her like glass shards, and she remembers her sixth-grade science class, the gurgle of the aquarium at the back of the room, the smell of chalk dust that morning the teacher held a prism out the window so it might fill with color, and she has a final, beautiful thought - that she is now inside that prism and knows something even the teacher does not know, that the prism's colors are voices, voices that swirl around her head like a crown, and at that moment her arms and legs she did not even know were flailing cease and she becomes part of the river.”
― Ron Rash, quote from Nothing Gold Can Stay: Stories
“Bridget Jones can kiss my spotty arse.”
― Jolie Booth, quote from The Girl Who'll Rule the World (Saturn Returns, #1)
“objects can be fixed or replaced. But the feelings of loved ones are not so easily mended.” Thr”
― Sherrilyn Kenyon, quote from Born of Legend
“He was breathing heavy, but speaking assurances, words of encouragement delivered in short sentences. "Hang in there now. It'll be okay. We're almost there. Almost there.”
― Victoria Danann, quote from My Familiar Stranger
The Road Back
The Piper's Son
QB VII
Left Drowning
Rebel Spring
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