Dan Simmons

"If one is to observe, M. Endymion, one must be in the proper place to observe."

"“There is no guarantee of happiness, wisdom, or long life if you drink of me this evening,” she says, very softly. There is no nirvana. There is no salvation. There is no afterlife. There is no rebirth. There is only immense knowledge—of the heart as well as the mind—and the potential for great discoveries, great adventures, and and a guarantee of more of the pain and terror that make up so much of our short lives.”"

"While I was obsessed with my own misery, there were other things occurring in the human universe."

"These were not religious fanatics, I saw, not mindless servants or self-punishing ascetics, but were, instead, row upon row of intelligent, questioning, alert young men and women."

"“Almost everything interesting in the human experience is the result of an individual experiencing, experimenting, explaining, and sharing,” said my young friend. “A hive mind would be the ancient television broadcasts, or life at the height of the datasphere...consensual idiocy.”"

"If there is a true secret to the universe, it is this...these first few seconds of warmth and entry and complete acceptance by one’s beloved."

"I realized that for this moment, nothing in the past mattered. Nothing terrible in the future mattered. What mattered was her skin against me, her hand holding me, the perfume of her hair and skin and the warmth of her breath against my chest. This was satori. This was truth."

"Although there are those among us now who have been granted the gift of being able to glimpse patterns of the future, probabilities tossed like dice on the uneven blanket of space and time, even these gifted ones know that no single future has been preordained for us or our posterity. Events are fluid. The future is like smoke from a burning forest, waiting for the wind of specific events and personal courage to blow the sparks and embers of reality this way or that."

"If the universe has any soul, it is the soul of irony."

"Choose again."

"There are no ghosts, my love. Death is final. The soul is that ineffable combination of memory and personality which we carry through life...when life departs, the soul also dies. Except for what we leave in the memory of those who loved us."

"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."

"“One of the few benefits of the fall of civilization as we know it,” he says, “is that there are private cellars with fine vintages everywhere one digs. It is not theft. It is archaeology.”"

"As is always the case when you are with the actual human being behind the celebrity or legend, there is something human about the man or woman that makes things less than myth."

"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."

"Sol realized what he had known and forgotten about very small communities: they were frequently annoying, always parochial, sometimes prying on a one-to-one level, but never had they subscribed to the vicious legacy of the so-called “public’s right to know.”"

"After fifty-five years of dedicating his life and work to the story of ethical systems, Sol Weintraub had come to a single, unshakable conclusion: any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principal (sic) which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being was evil."

"Listen! There will be no more offerings, neither child nor parent. There will be no more sacrifices for anyone other than our fellow human. The time of obedience and atonement is past."

"“How about,” she said, “that you do the logical thing because it’s the logical thing to do?”"

"If our society ever opted for Orwell’s Big Brother approach, the instrument of choice for oppression would have to be the credit wake. In a totally noncash economy with only a vestigial barter black market, a person’s activities could be tracked in real time by monitoring the credit wake of his or her universal card. There were strict laws protecting card privacy but laws had a bad habit of being ignored or abrogated when societal push came to totalitarian shove."

"It struck me that his dialect was actually the nondialect of someone who has learned a new language perfectly but without the lazy shortcuts of someone born to it."

"In such seconds of decision entire futures are made."

"There is something about raising a child that helps to sharpen one’s sense of what is real."

"It no longer matters who consider themselves the masters of events. Events no longer obey their masters."

"Doing a life study while drunk and in the process of being seduced is never a formula for quality art."

"It was a dramatization of total chaos, a functional definition of confusion, an unchoreographed dance of sad violence. It was war."

"My own guess is that it’s a myth fueled by the same hunger for superstitious verities that drives other religions."

"Those who ignore history’s lessons in the ultimate folly of war are forced to do more than relive them...they may be forced to die by them."

"“War does not call for judgment,” I said, “merely survival.”"

"“I wish we had the technology to fight God on an equal basis,” he said in low, tight tones. “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.”"

"There 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. Not this time. Not ever again."

"Sol remembered the dream, remembered his daughter’s hug, and realized that in the end—when all else is dust—loyalty to those we love is all we can carry with us to the grave."

"Mobs have passions, not brains."

"The place was part museum, part library, and part archive; I loved it at first sight...and smell, for here there were thousands of printed books, many very old indeed, and nothing smells quite as wonderful as old books."

"He knew what had to be done. It is not always the same as knowing what to do."

"Christ may have lost his faith for a few seconds; He did not sell it in the marketplace for the trinkets of ego and curiosity."

"“Gold,” says the Consul, knowing that this is the only syllable that has held its power over the ages."

"Have you considered that these prophecies were not divine revelations, but merely manipulation from some secular power?"

"The Great Change is when humankind accepts its role as part of the natural order of the universe instead of its role as a cancer."

"We are created for precisely this sort of suffering. In the end, it is all we are, those limpid tide pools of self-consciousness between crashing waves of pain."

"Human philosophy tends to shake down into values which might be categorizes as intellectual, religious, moral, and aesthetic."

"“Sometimes,” said General Morpurgo, taking her hand, “dreams are all that separate us from the machines.”"

"Religion and ethics were not always—or even frequently—mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often reflected 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."

"With a sudden clarity which went beyond the immediacy of his pain or sorrow, Sol Weintraub suddenly understood perfectly why Abraham had agreed to sacrifice Isaac, his son, when the Lord commanded him to do so. It was not obedience. It was not even to put the love of God above the love of his son. Abraham was testing God. By denying the sacrifice at the last moment, by stopping the knife, God had earned the right—in Abraham’s eyes and the hearts of his offspring—to become the God of Abraham."

"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 Earth. No room for love there. It seemed that Abraham had offered to murder his son to test a phantom."

"I learned that poets aren’t God, but if there is a God...or anything approaching a God...he’s a poet. And a failed one at that."

"I was not surprised to wake up alive. I suppose one is surprised only when one awakens dead."

"De Soya blinks. “Suicide is a mortal sin,” he says. On the screen the girl nods seriously. “Yes,” she says, “but I am not a Christian. Also, I'd rather go to hell than go with you.”"

"Why am I seeking logic or sanity here? I'd asked myself at the moment. There hasn’t been any so far."

"Information is always to be treasured, Raul. It is behind only love and honesty in a person’s attempt to understand the universe."