“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.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from The Rise of Endymion
“It has been my experience that immediately after certain traumatic separations—leaving one’s family to go to war, for instance, or upon the death of a family member, or after parting from one’s beloved with no assurances of reunion—there is a strange calmness, almost a sense of relief, as if the worst has happened and nothing else need be dreaded.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from The Rise of Endymion
“The problem with being passionately in love ... is that it deprives you of too much sleep.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from The Rise of Endymion
“The universe deepened at that moment, the music of the spheres grew from a mere chorus to a symphony as triumphant as Beethoven’s Ninth, and I knew that I would always be able to hear it when I wished or needed to, always be able to Use it to take the step I needed to see the one I loved, or, failing that, step to the place where I had been with the one I loved, or, failing that, find a place to love for its own beauty and richness.
The energy of quasars and exploding stellar nuclei filled me then. I was borne up on waves of energy more lovely and more lyrical even than the Ouster angels’ wings seen sliding along corridors of sunlight. The shell of deadly energy that was my prison and execution cell seemed laughable now, Schrödinger’s original joke, a child’s jump rope laid around me on the ground as restraining walls.
I stepped out of the Schrödinger cat box and out of Armaghast System.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from The Rise of Endymion
“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.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from The Rise of Endymion
“evolution is not progress, that there is no ‘goal’ or direction to evolution. Evolution is change. Evolution ‘succeeds’ if that change best adapts some leaf or branch of its tree of life to conditions of the universe.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from The Rise of Endymion
“Thus evolved some members of the Core—not altruists, but desperate survivalists who realized that the only way ultimately to win their never-ending zero-sum game was to stop the game. And to stop the game they needed to evolve into a species capable of empathy.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from The Rise of Endymion
“[The Void Which Binds] actual but unaccessible presence in our universe is one of the prime causes for our species elaborating myth and religion, for our stubborn, blind belief in extrasensory powers, in telepathy and precognition, in demons and demigods and resurrection and reincarnation and ghosts and messiahs and so many other categories of almost-but-not-quite satisfying bullshit.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from The Rise of Endymion
“I could not do this, I realized, if I were immortal. This degree of love of life and of one another is granted, I saw for once and for ever, not to immortals, but to those who live briefly and always under the shadow of death and loss.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from The Rise of Endymion
“That’s what writers and artists and creators do, boy. Listen to the Void and try to hear dead folks’ thoughts. Feel their pain. The pain of living folks too. Finding a muse is just an artist or holy man’s way of getting a foot in the Void Which Binds’ front door. Aenea knew that. You should have too.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from The Rise of Endymion
“At that moment I would have welcomed spider-rats nibbling on my toes about as much as the idea of chatting with a missionary priest.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from The Rise of Endymion
“Children bring chaos and clutter and an infinite potential for the future”
― Dan Simmons, quote from The Rise of Endymion
“We’ve been stuck in one species since our Cro-Magnon ancestors helped to wipe out the smarter Neanderthals,” she said. “Now it’s our chance to diversify rapidly, and institutions like the Hegemony, the Pax, and the Core are stopping it.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from The Rise of Endymion
“Aenea heard the music of the spheres. She resonated with the Void Which Binds, which resonates in turn to sentient life and thought, and then she used the almost illimitable energy of the Void to … to take the first step.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from The Rise of Endymion
“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.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from The Rise of Endymion
“Nothing had ever been so welcome by its absence.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from The Rise of Endymion
“The Hegemony had known how to treat cancer, but most of the gene-tailoring knowledge and technology had been lost after the Fall.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from The Rise of Endymion
“In an interstellar society where the Church ruled all but absolutely, news awaited not only independent confirmation but official permission to exist.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from The Rise of Endymion
“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.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from The Rise of Endymion
“beyond ideology and ambition, beyond thought and emotion, there was only pain. And salvation from it.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from The Rise of Endymion
“No lifetime is long enough for those who wish to create,”
― Dan Simmons, quote from The Rise of Endymion
“But this is human life: the war, the deeds, The disappointment, the anxiety, Imagination’s struggles, far and nigh, All human; bearing in themselves this good, That they are still the air, the subtle food, To make us feel existence, and to show How quiet death is. Where soil is men grow, Whether to weeds or flowers; but for me, There is no depth to strike in”
― Dan Simmons, quote from The Rise of Endymion
“Aenea nodded. “It’s wonderful to preserve tradition, but a healthy organism evolves … culturally and physically.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from The Rise of Endymion
“This is all too important.” Aenea smiled. “It’s all too important. That’s the damned problem, isn’t it?” She turned her face back to the stars.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from The Rise of Endymion
“Le disgustaba morir, y no quería morir más de lo necesario.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from The Rise of Endymion
“and my editor, Tom Dupree, for his patience, enthusiasm, and shared good taste for loving Mystery Science Theater 3000.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from The Rise of Endymion
Dan Simmons
Born place: in Peoria, Illinois, The United States
Born date April 4, 1948
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“Things could change, Gabe," Jonas went on. "Things could be different. I don't know how, but there must be some way for things to be different. There could be colors. And grandparents," he added, staring through the dimness toward the ceiling of his sleepingroom. "And everybody would have the memories."
"You know the memories," he whispered, turning toward the crib.
Garbriel's breathing was even and deep. Jonas liked having him there, though he felt guilty about the secret. Each night he gave memories to Gabriel: memories of boat rides and picnics in the sun; memories of soft rainfall against windowpanes; memories of dancing barefoot on a damp lawn.
"Gabe?"
The newchild stirred slightly in his sleep. Jonas looked over at him.
"There could be love," Jonas whispered.”
― Lois Lowry, quote from The Giver
“They want to be natural, the anti-social little beasts. They just don't realize that everyone's good depends on everyone's cooperation.”
― Richard Adams, quote from Watership Down
“To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen.... And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
“Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.
And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.
There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Handmaid's Tale
“There should be a statute of limitation on grief. A rulebook that says it is all right to wake up crying, but only for a month. That after 42 days you will no longer turn with your heart racing, certain you have heard her call out your name. That there will be no fine imposed if you feel the need to clean out her desk; take down her artwork from the refrigerator; turn over a school portrait as you pass - if only because it cuts you fresh again to see it. That it's okay to measure the time she has been gone, the way we once measured her birthdays.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from My Sister's Keeper
Sea Glass
Moonrise
Spy Glass
Nobody's Boy (Sans F...
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