Dan Simmons

"I realized that night the import and the terrible difficulty in the task ahead of me—in keeping this child safe from the sharp edges of a strange and indifferent universe. I think that is was on this alien and storm-tossed night that I first understood what it might be like to be a parent."

"One of the men in the boat—I could not remember which character—had moved through all of the circles of theological supposition: praying, believing that God was a merciful Deity who sat up nights worrying about him, then believing that God was a cruel bastard, and finally deciding that no one was listening."

"The universe is indifferent to our fates. This was the crushing burden that the character took with him as he struggled through the surf toward survival or extinction. The universe just does not give a shit."

"I heard the hiss and felt the blessed numbness spreading. If there is a God, I thought, it’s a painkiller."

"“Entropy is a bitch,” I said. “Now, now,” said Aenea from where she was leaning on the terrace wall. “Entropy can be our friend.” “When?” I said. She turned around so that she was leaning back on her elbows. The building behind her was a dark rectangle, serving to highlight the glow of her sunburned skin. “It wears down empires,” she said. “And does in despotisms.”"

"“Humanity has evolved—as far as it has evolved,” continued the old priest, “with no thanks to its predecessors or itself. Evolution brings human beings. Human beings, through a long and painful process, bring humanity.” “Empathy,” Aenea said softly."

"The future is never written...only penciled in."

"I began to understand. “A Faustian bargain...,” I said. “The Faustian bargain,” said the girl. “All the church had to do to gain the universe was sell its soul.”"

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

"Each of them was intimately aware of the procedure for electing a pope—not only of the antiquated mechanisms, of course, but of the politicking, pressuring, deal-making, bluffing, and outright blackmail that had often accompanied the process over the centuries."

"“What was the Depression?” “Bad economic times in their pure capitalist nation-state,” Aenea said. “Remember, the economy wasn’t really global then, and it depended upon private money institutions called banks, gold reserves, and the value of physical money—actual coins and pieces of paper that were supposed to be worth something. It was all a consensual hallucination, of course, and in the 1930s, the hallucination turned nightmare.”"

"Never make unsupportable assumptions about your enemies, Martin. It can be a fatal self-indulgence."

"Aenea smiled but her eyes still glistened. “Humans have been waiting for Jesus and Yahweh and E. T. to save their asses since before they covered those asses with bearskins and came out of the cave,” she said. “They’ll have to keep waiting. This is our business...our fight...and we have to take care of it ourselves.”"

"I realized then what I had known since I was a child watching my mother die of cancer—namely, that beyond ideology and ambition, beyond thought and emotion, there was only pain. And salvation from it.”"

"“What?” “Never mind. It will make sense when it comes about. All improbabilities do when probability waves collapse into event.”"

"I thought—To lose all this forever? And I hallucinated Aenea’s voice saying To lose all this forever is the essence of being human, my love."

"I don’t think that I want to make any wager if it means dealing with a Church that has grown so corrupt that it makes obedience and submission the price of its saving the life of someone’s child."

"“Pascal’s Wager never appealed to me. It seems logically...shallow.” “Perhaps because it posits only two choices,” said Aenea. Somewhere in the desert night, an owl made a short, sharp sound. “Spiritual resurrection and immortality or death and damnation,” she said. “Those last two aren’t the same thing,” I said. “No, but perhaps to someone like Blaise Pascal they were. Someone terrified of ‘the eternal silence of these infinite spaces.’” “A spiritual agoraphobic,” I said. Aenea laughed. The sound was so sincere and spontaneous that I could not help loving it. Her. “Religion seems to have always offered that false duality,” she said, setting her cup of tea on a flat stone. “The silences of infinite space or the cozy comfort of inner certainty.”"

"“Perhaps our reservoir of spiritual faith has run out.” “Perhaps it should have run out a long time ago,” I said sternly. “Superstition has taken a terrible toll on our species. Wars...pogroms...resistance to logic and science and medicine...not to mention gathering power in the hands of people like those who run the Pax.”"

"Dogma and hierarchy are endemic to such structures...indeed, such are the structures of any theocracy."

"The human mind gets used to strangeness very quickly if it does not exhibit interesting behavior."

"“And the sad fact is that all nanotech life out of our control—out of anyone’s control. The essence of nanotech life’s evolution is autonomy, self-will, and goals which have nothing to do with those of the harboring life form.” “Humanity, you mean,” said Lourdusamy. “Precisely.”"

"I ached everywhere. It was hard to separate the dull agony of the shattered leg from the ache in my head and my back and my guts. My skull felt as if there were a ball of mercury in it that shifted ponderously long seconds after my head itself turned. The vertigo made me sick again, but I had nothing left to vomit. I hung on the tangle of branches and contemplated the glories of adventure."

"Twenty kilometers. At an average speed of 120 klicks per hour, we should cover the distance in ten minutes. Ten freezing, adrenaline-pumping, gorge-rising, terror-beating-against-the-ribs, react-in-a-microsecond-or-die seconds."

"Crudely effective, but wildly inefficient."

"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. 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."

"“I am of no faith,” said Aenea. “If one defines faith as belief in the supernatural.”"

"“We know for a fact that the Buddha refused to speculate with his disciples on whether there was such a thing such as life after death. ‘Such questions,’ he said, ‘are not relevant to the practice of the Path and cannot be answered while bound by the restraints of human existence.’ Most of Buddhism, you see, gentlemen, can be explored, appreciated, and utilized as a tool toward enlightenment without descending into the supernatural.”"

"“The Void Which Binds is touched by all of us who have wept with happiness, bidden a lover good-bye, been exalted with orgasm, stood over the grave of a loved one, or watched our baby open his or her eyes for the first time.” Aenea is looking at me as she speaks, and I feel the gooseflesh rise along my arms. “The Void Which Binds is always under and above the surface of our thoughts and senses,” she continues, invisible but as present as the breathing of our beloved next to us in the night. Its 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.”"

"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."

"“The Core knows what Teilhard de Chardin and other sentimentalists refused to acknowledge: 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."

"I now understand the need for faith—pure, blind, fly-in-the-face-of-reason faith—as a small life preserver in the wild and endless sea of a universe ruled by unfeeling laws and totally indifferent to the small, reasoning beings that inhabit it."

"The lieutenant took his time scanning their visa chips, letting them wait in the drizzle, occasionally making a comment with the idle arrogance common to such nobodies who have just come into a small bit of power."

"In 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."

"Belief in one’s identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one’s immortality...and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful."

"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."

"Yes, our DNA is unique but so is a salamander’s."

"Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.”"

"Words are the only bullets in truth’s bandolier. And poets are the snipers."

"In the beginning was the Word. In the end...past honor, past life, past caring... In the end will be the Word."

"Another friend, a child psychologist from the college, once commented that Rachel at age five showed the most reliable indicators of true giftedness in a young person: structured curiosity, empathy for others, compassion, and a fierce sense of fair play."

"Sol found their tracts the usual combination of double talk and navel lint-gathering common to most religions."

"Sarai had treasured every stage of Rachel’s childhood, enjoying the day-to-day normalcy of things; a normalcy which she quietly accepted as the best of life. She had always felt that the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and the triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unself-conscious flow of little things—the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossing and connections casual, dialogues imminently (sic) forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal."

"The story of Rachel’s unique illness was no secret in Crawford, of course. The fact of it had spread through the college the first year of Rachel’s return and the entire town knew soon after. Crawford reacted in the fashion of small towns immemorial—some tongues wagged constantly, some people could not keep the pity and pleasure at someone else’s misfortune out of their voices and gazes—but mostly the community had folded its protective wings around the Weintraub family like an awkward mother bird shielding its young."

"“I ignore religions,” said Brawne Lamia. “I do not succumb to them.”"