“The sunset was that long, achingly beautiful balance of stillness in which the sun seemed to hover like a red balloon above the western horizon, the entire sky catching fire from the death of day; a sunset unique to the American Midwest and ignored by most of its inhabitants. The twilight brought the promise of coolness and the certain threat of night.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Summer of Night
“People always pay a lot of money for things that make them stupid.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Summer of Night
“Sometimes Duane imagined that he was the single crewman on a receding starship, already light-years from Earth, unable to turn around, doomed never to return, unable even to reach his destination in a human lifetime, but still connected by this expanding arc of electromagnetic radiation, rising now through the onionlike layers of old radio shows, traveling back in time as he traveled forward in space, listening to voices whose owners had long since died, moving back toward Marconi and then silence.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Summer of Night
“He suspected that Duane had lived in those lofty realms of thought, listening to the voices of men long dead rising from books the way he'd once said he listened to late-night radio shows in his basement.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Summer of Night
“Old Central School still stood upright, holding its secrets and silences firmly within. Eighty-four years of chalkdust floated in the rare shafts of sunlight inside while the memories of more than eight decades of varnishings rose from the dark stairs and floors to tinge the trapped air with the mahogany scent of coffins. The walls of Old Central were so thick that they seemed to absorb sounds while the tall windows, their glass warped and distorted by age and gravity, tinted the air with a sepia tiredness. Time moved more slowly in Old Central, if at all. Footsteps echoed along corridors and up stairwells, but the sound seemed muted and out of synch with any motion amidst the shadows. The cornerstone of Old Central had been laid in 1876, the year that General Custer and his men had been slaughtered near the Little Bighorn River far to the west, the year that the first telephone had been exhibited at the nation’s Centennial in Philadelphia far to the east. Old Central School was erected in Illinois, midway between the two events but far from any flow of history.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Summer of Night
“A human being on this world, Duane realized with a shock of recognition approaching vertigo, made no more permanent impression than does a hand thrust in water. Remove the hand, and water rushes in to fill the void as if nothing had ever been there.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Summer of Night
“Дейл тихо опустил голову, зная, что все это — спутник, и пещеру бутлегеров, и многое многое другое — могут повториться и завтра, и через неделю, но что этот момент — друзья сидевшие рядом, едва слышные шорохи летней ночи, голоса родителей снизу, чувство какой-то бесконечности лета, которое как обычно принес август — что этот момент единственный и неповторимы. И что он должен быть сохранен.
И пока Майк и Лоуренс, Кевин, Харлен и Корди провожали глазами светлую точку, на их запрокинутых лицах читалась вера в то, что на их глазах начинается новая эра, Дейл молча следил за ними. Он думал о своем друге Дьюане и о том, как можно описать то, что видишь, словами, как это делал он.
И затем, инстинктивно зная, что такие минуты нужно замечать, но нельзя губить их наблюдениями, Дейл присоединился к друзьям, провожая взглядом Эхо, уже коснувшийся горизонта и начавший тускнеть.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Summer of Night
Dan Simmons
Born place: in Peoria, Illinois, The United States
Born date April 4, 1948
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“Countless words
count less
than the silent balance
between yin and yang”
― Lao Tzu, quote from Tao Te Ching
“We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, quote from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
“….So much crueller than any British colony, they say, so much more brutal towards the local Africans, so much more manipulative after begrudgingly granting independence. But the history of British colonialism in Africa, from Sierra Leone to Zimbabwe, Kenya to Botswana and else-where, is not fundamentally different from what Belgium did in the Congo. You can argue about degree, but both systems were predicated on the same assumption: that white outsiders knew best and Africans were to be treated not as partners, but as underlings. What the British did in Kenya to suppress the pro-independence mau-mau uprising in the 1950s, using murder, torture and mass imprisonment, was no more excusable than the mass arrests and political assassinations committed by Belgium when it was trying to cling on to the Congo. And the outside world's tolerance of a dictator in the Congo like Mobutu, whose corruption and venality were overlooked for strategic expedience, was no different from what happened in Zimbabwe, where the dictator Robert Mugabe was allowed to run his country and its people into the ground because Western powers gullibly accepted the way he presented himself as the only leader able to guarantee stability and an end to civil strife. Those sniffy British colonial types might not like to admit it, but the Congo represents the quintessence of the entire continent’s colonial experience. It might be extreme and it might be shocking, but what happened in the Congo is nothing but colonialism in its purest, basest form.”
― Tim Butcher, quote from Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart
“What did you spend so much time talking about with Ila? If you weren’t dancing with that long-legged fellow, you were talking to her like it was some kind of secret.”
“Ila was giving me advice on being a woman,” Egwene replied absently. He began laughing, and she gave him a hooded, dangerous look that he failed to see.
“Advice! Nobody tells us how to be men. We just are.”
“That,” Egwene said, “is probably why you make such a bad job of it.”
― Robert Jordan, quote from The Eye of the World
“How wonderful to be alive, he thought. But why does it always hurt?”
― Boris Pasternak, quote from Doctor Zhivago
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