01UndatedI desperately want to talk to her now. I want to ask her who it was who so deftly crafted and shaped the legend that was our love.Dan Simmons / quote ↗
02Undated... all good things beyond sleep come precisely because we defy gravity while we live.Dan Simmons / quote ↗
04UndatedSol wanted to know how any ethical system – much less a religion so indomitable that it had survived every evil mankind could throw at it – could flow from a command from God for a man to slaughter his son. It did not matter to Sol that the command had been rescinded at the last moment. It did not matter that the command was a test of obedience. In fact, the idea that it was the obedience of Abraham which allowed him to become the father of all the tribes of Israel was precisely what drove Sol into fits of fury.Dan Simmons / quote ↗
05Undated... primitive times had required primitive obedience, that later generations evolved to the point where parents offered themselves as sacrifice - as in the dark knights of the ovens which pocked old earth history - and that current generations had to deny any command for sacrifice. Sol had written that whatever God now took in human consciousness - whether as a mere manifestation of the subconscious in all its revanchist needs or as a more conscious attempt at philosophical and ethical evolution - humankind could no longer agree to offer up sacrifice in God's name. Sacrifice and the agreement to sacrifice had written human history in blood.Dan Simmons / quote ↗
06UndatedEvery age fraught with discord and danger seems to spawn a leader meant only for that age, a political giant whose absence, in retrospect, seems inconceivable when the history of that age is written.Dan Simmons / quote ↗
07UndatedIt no longer matters who consider themselves the masters of events. Events no longer obey their masters.Dan Simmons / quote ↗
09UndatedEagles are extinct," grumbled Morpurgo. "Perhaps they should have attacked the sky. It betrayed them.Dan Simmons / quote ↗
10UndatedThe 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 ↗
11UndatedThe 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 ↗
12UndatedThat’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 ↗
13UndatedI 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 ↗
14UndatedIf I should die," said I to myself, "I have left no immortal work behind me - nothing to make my friends proud of my memory - but I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember'd.Dan Simmons / quote ↗
15Undated... a comment with the idle arrogance common of such nobodies who have just come into a small bit of power.Dan Simmons / quote ↗
17UndatedSo many important things pass quickly without being understood at the time. So many powerful moments are buried beneath the absurdDan Simmons / quote ↗
18UndatedI loved you backward and forward in time. I loved you beyond boundaries of time and space.Dan Simmons / quote ↗
19UndatedAt 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 ↗
20UndatedFor seven centuries the existence of Grand Unification Theories and hyperstring post-quantum physics and Core-given understanding of the universe as self-contained and boundless, without Big Bang singularities or corresponding endpoints, had pretty much eliminated any role of God—primitively anthropomorphic or sophisticatedly post-Einsteinian—even as a caretaker or pre-Creation former of rules. The modern universe, as machine and man had come to understand it, needed no Creator; in fact, allowed no Creator. Its rules allowed very little tinkering and no major revisions. It had not begun and would not end, beyond cycles of expansion and contraction as regular and self-regulated as the seasons on Old EarthDan Simmons / quote ↗
21UndatedThe 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 ↗
22UndatedThe Great Change is when humankind accepts its role as part of the natural order of the universe instead of its role as a cancerDan Simmons / quote ↗
24UndatedI loved almost everything about being a teacher, but I was an unusual teacher.Dan Simmons / quote ↗
