The collection / 73 fragments

The living archive

Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

SearchTypeTopicEraCulture / collection labelCountry attributionTraditionOrder

Author

Leave empty for every voice. Browse all authors ↗

Reset

Culture labels and country attributions follow the source collections; earliest origins may be unknown.

73 results · Page 2 of 4Play this collection ▷

01Undated

Its hard to die. Harder to live

Dan Simmons / quote

↗

02Undated

No lifetime is long enough for those who wish to create, Raul. Or for those who simply wish to understand themselves and their lives. It is, perhaps, the curse of being human, but also a blessing.

Dan Simmons / quote

↗

03Undated

... you "met" this Moneta ... or whatever her real name is ... in her past but your future ... in a meeting that's still to come

Dan Simmons / quote

↗

04Undated

The words sounded like a mournful incantation.

Dan Simmons / quote

↗

05Undated

in Theo – quiet, efficient Theo – to get him through the morning. Trusting in luck to get him through the day. Trusting in the drinking at Cicero’s to get him through the night. Trusting in the unimportance of his posting to get him through life.

Dan Simmons / quote

↗

06Undated

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. Example: the Chinese pictogram for ‘integrity’ is a two-part symbol of a man literally standing next to his word. So far, so good. But what does the Late English word ‘honesty’ mean? Or ‘Motherland’? Or ‘progress’? Or ‘democracy’? Or ‘beauty’? But even in our self-deception, we become gods.

Dan Simmons / quote

↗

07Undated

She [Beatrice] alone was still real for him, still implied meaning in the world, and beauty. Her nature became his landmark - what Melville would call, with more sobriety than we can now muster, his Greenwich Standard ...

Dan Simmons / quote

↗

08Undated

The past is dead and buried. But I know now that buried things have a way of rising to the surface when one least expects them to.

Dan Simmons / quote

↗

09Undated

All those before us have gone into the darkness without assurance of logic or fact or persuasive theory, with only a slender thread of hope or all too shakable convention of faith. And they have been able to sustain that slim hope in the face of darkness, then so must I.

Dan Simmons / quote

↗

10Undated

All those before us have gone into the darkness without assurance of logic fact or persuasive theory, with only a slender thread of hope or the all too shakable convinction of faith. And if they have been able to sustain that slim hope in the face of darkness, then so must I.

Dan Simmons / quote

↗

11Undated

Pain and darkness have been our lot since the Fall of Man. But there must be some hope that we can rise to a higher level ... that consciousness can evolve to a plane more benevolent than its counterpoint of a universe hardwired to indifference.

Dan Simmons / quote

↗

12Undated

All of our lives are governed by a certain degree of faith in bullshit.

Dan Simmons / quote

↗

13Undated

[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

↗

14Undated

You have to live to really know things, my love

Dan Simmons / quote

↗

15Undated

There is a fullness and calmness there which can come only from knowing pain.

Dan Simmons / quote

↗

16Undated

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

↗

17Undated

Dan Simmons / quote

↗

18Undated

Life is brutal that way... the loss of irrecoverable moments amid trivia and distraction.

Dan Simmons / quote

↗

19Undated

Look,’ said Tyrena. ‘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

↗

20Undated

Reading your sonnets?” asked Orphu. Mahnmut closed the book. “How’d you know? Have you taken up telepathy now that you’ve lost your eyes?” “Not yet,” rumbled the Ionian. Orphu’s great crab shell was lashed to the deck ten meters from where Mahnmut sat near the bow. “Some of your silences are more literary than others, is all.

Dan Simmons / quote

↗

21Undated

Love was as hardwired into the structure of the universe as gravity and matter.

Dan Simmons / quote

↗

22Undated

... pain has been with him since birth - the universe's gift to a poet ...

Dan Simmons / quote

↗

23Undated

As Ummon and the other Masters teach, it explains why the giraffe evolved a long neck but never why the other animals did not. It explains why humankind evolved to intelligence, but not why the tree near the front gate refused to.

Dan Simmons / quote

↗

24Undated

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

↗