Dan Simmons
Dan Simmons
Dan Simmonsis an American science fiction and horror writer. He is the author of the Hyperion Cantos and the Ilium/Olympos cycles...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth4 April 1948
CountryUnited States of America
passion brain crowds
The sum of the crowd's IQ was far below that of its most modest single member. Mobs have passions, not brains.
giving despair president
I despair at the rise of modern violence. I truly give in to despair at times, that deep, futureless pit of despair.... I watch the American slaughterhouse, the casual attacks on popes, presidents, and uncounted others, and I wonder if there are many more out there with the Ability or if butchery has simply become the modern way of life.
essence violence aberration
You treat violence as an aberration ... when in truth it is the norm. It is the very essence of the human condition.
self way waste
A token of ecological awareness in a society devoted to self destruction and waste but unwilling to acknowledge its indulgent ways.
pain fall men
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.
sex pain mistake
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.
sleep good-things gravity
... all good things beyond sleep come precisely because we defy gravity while we live.
loyalty love-is dust
In the end--when all else is dust--loyalty to those we love is all we can carry with us to the grave. Faith--true faith--was trusting in that love.
passion brain
Mobs have passions, not brains.
expression once-upon-a-time brain
Once upon a time ... the only autonomous intelligences we humans knew of were us humans. We thought then that if humankind ever devised another intelligence that it would be the result of a huge project ... a great mass of silicon and ancient transistors and chips and circuit boards ... a machine with lots of networking circuits, in other words, aping-if you will pardon the expression-the human brain in form and function. Of course, AIs did not evolve that way. They sort of slipped into existence when we humans were looking the other way.
faith sea law
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.
mobility doe twins
Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion
grease meat foam
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.
pain knowing fullness
There is a fullness and calmness there which can come only from knowing pain.