01UndatedTo 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. 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 ↗
02UndatedI 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.Dan Simmons / quote ↗
03UndatedThere 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.Dan Simmons / quote ↗
04UndatedWhen 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?Dan Simmons / quote ↗
05UndatedIn 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 ↗
06UndatedPrison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversionDan Simmons / quote ↗
07UndatedReligion 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.Dan Simmons / quote ↗
08UndatedHe loved the darkness and the mystery of the Catholic service--the tall priest strutting like a carrion crow and pronouncing magic in a dead language, the immediate magic of the Eucharist bringing the dead back to life so that the faithful could devour Him and become of Him, the smell of incense and the mystical chanting.Dan Simmons / quote ↗
09Undated...Data itself... was tolerable. It was the constant nerve-web-expanding pain of context that would kill him.Dan Simmons / quote ↗
12UndatedI 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 ↗
13UndatedLuckily, even as a young man not yet become himself, John Bridgens had two things besides indecision that kept him from self-destruction - books and a sense of irony.Dan Simmons / quote ↗
14UndatedThey lay together in a sheltered place among the ruins of Brasilia while deathbeams from Chinese EMVs played like blue searchlights on broken ceramic walls.Dan Simmons / quote ↗
15UndatedThe beauty of that June day was almost staggering. After the wet spring, everything that could turn green had outdone itself in greenness and everything that could even dream of blooming or blossoming was in bloom and blossom. The sunlight was a benediction. The breezes were so caressingly soft and intimate on the skin as to be embarrassing.Dan Simmons / quote ↗
16UndatedTyrena did not laugh again but her smile slashed upward in a twist of green lips. “Martin, Martin, Martin,” she said, “the population of literate people has been declining steadily since Gutenberg’s day. By the twentieth century, less than two percent of the people in the so-called industrialized democracies read even one book a year. And that was before the smart machines, dataspheres, and user-friendly environments.Dan Simmons / quote ↗
17UndatedI take my favorite and most promising lads to the theater,” said [Sherlock] Holmes. “I'd say that if they were born into better circumstances many would have grown up to be MP’s, but in truth most are too smart and too honest for Parliament.Dan Simmons / quote ↗
18Undated... The continuation of her life was more than another day of breathing, but was the gift of another day of engagement with her beloved across the spectrum of all things.Dan Simmons / quote ↗
21UndatedWhat, after all, is more real to us than the geography of our childhoods?Dan Simmons / quote ↗
22UndatedTo 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 ↗
23UndatedBut, Dad…” She hesitated. “It will mean raising me all over again. It means suffering through my childhood for a third time. No parent should be asked to do that.”Sol managed a smile. “No parent would refuse that, Rachel.Dan Simmons / quote ↗
24UndatedWho are you, Hockenberry, to thwart Fate and defy the Will of the Gods?I am me, Thomas Hockenberry. I am fed up with these power-addled thugs who call themselves gods.Dan Simmons / quote ↗
