110+ Dan Simmons Quotes On Politics, Education And Nature

Dan Simmons is an American author of science fiction, horror, and fantasy novels. He is best known for his Hyperion Cantos series, which won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1992. His other works include The Terror, The Hollow Man, and The Fall of Hyperion. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Dan Simmons on politics, leadership, education.

Top 10 Dan Simmons Quotes

1. 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
2. Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers.
3. 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.
4. Nobody gets beyond a petroleum economy. Not while there's petroleum there.
5. Seduction... was both a science and art - a blend of skill, discipline, proximity, and opportunity. Mostly proximity.
6. History viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.
7. Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.
8. Love was as hardwired into the structure of the universe as gravity and matter.
9. Movie SF is, by definition, dumbed down - there have only been three or four SF movies in the history of film that aspire to the complexity of literary SF.
10. A token of ecological awareness in a society devoted to self destruction and waste but unwilling to acknowledge its indulgent ways.

Dan Simmons Short Quotes

• It started 25 years ago, when I was teaching elementary school in a small town in Missouri.
• As for the depiction of the Catholic church, it's not meant to be a prediction.
• It's odd how violence and humor so often go together, isn't it?
• Life doesn't retreat.
• Stupidity has a price and it always gets paid.
• No book or poem is ever finished, merely abandoned.
• Lovemaking seems all too absurd when described.
• If our god's work is to be done in our time, we must do it ourselves.
• God is found in this Life ... to wait for another is folly.
• But it's not just a game of finding literary references.

Dan Simmons Quotes About Love

Love is nothing but lust misspelled. — Dan Simmons

I think all the simple things can and do still work - holding your child's hand while walking across the street will do it. But we can hardly hear it for all the noise which has turned love into a cliche, and most people can't even hear John Lennon's "All You Need Is Love" anymore without wincing. — Dan Simmons

The problem with being passionately in love ... is that it deprives you of too much sleep. — Dan Simmons

I loved almost everything about being a teacher, but I was an unusual teacher. — Dan Simmons

I loved you backward and forward in time. I loved you beyond boundaries of time and space. — Dan Simmons

You have to live to really know things, my love — Dan Simmons

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. — Dan Simmons

The love of violence is an aspect of our humanity. Even the weak wish to be strong primarily so they can wield the whip. — Dan Simmons

Want to talk about Shakespeare's sonnets? asked Orphu of Io. Are you shitting me? The moravecs loved the ancient human colloquial phrases, the more scatological the better. Yes, said Orphu. I am most definitely shitting you, my friend. — Dan Simmons

Dan Simmons Quotes About Writing

Writing, I'm convinced, should be a subversive activity - frowned on by the authorities - and not one cooed over and praised beyond common sense by some teacher. — Dan Simmons

No one inspired me to write, but writer Harlan Ellison terrified me into getting published. — Dan Simmons

It's one of the strangest attributes of this profession that when we writers get exhausted writing one thing, we relax by writing another. — Dan Simmons

Dan Simmons Quotes About Writer

I knew that I wanted to be a writer even before I knew exactly what being a writer entailed. — Dan Simmons

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. — Dan Simmons

Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion — Dan Simmons

This is every writer's nightmare - the sudden breakdown of meaning in the language that sustains and supports us. — Dan Simmons

Dan Simmons Famous Quotes And Sayings

There is no doubt that I have discovered the ultimate in stagnant human societies. The Bikura have realized the human dream of immortality and have paid for it with their humanity and their immortal souls. — Dan Simmons

Poetry is only secondarily about words. Primarily, it is about truth. I dealt with the Ding an Sich, the substance behind the shadow, weaving powerful concepts, similes, and connections the way an engineer would raise a skyscraper with the whiskered-alloy skeleton being constructed long before the glass and plastic and chromaluminum appears. — Dan Simmons

The beauty of that June day was almost staggering. After the wet spring, everything that could turn green had outdone itself in greenness and everything that could even dream of blooming or blossoming was in bloom and blossom. The sunlight was a benediction. The breezes were so caressingly soft and intimate on the skin as to be embarrassing. — Dan Simmons

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. — Dan Simmons

Anticlimax is, of course, the warp and way of things. Real life seldom structures a decent denouement. — Dan Simmons

A hero. You want to be one of those rare human beings who make history, rather than merely watch it flow around them like water around a rock. — Dan Simmons

The truth is, it's not a great career move to create a readership and then, in effect, abandon them. — Dan Simmons

Wilkie Collins was a rival and competitor of Dickens. His novel Moonstone sold more copies at the time than Dickens' last two books. But that meant nothing in the long run. Right now, to be honest, Wilkie Collins is what he deserved to be back then: a footnote, an almost lost memory. And he knew he would become that. — Dan Simmons

There's a unique bond of trust between readers and authors that I don't believe exists in any other art form; as a reader, I trust a novelist to give me his or her best effort, however flawed. — Dan Simmons

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

The young remember most deeply.... When we are old and failing, it is the memories of childhood which can be summoned most clearly. — Dan Simmons

If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include the truth of contact or be forever hollow. — Dan Simmons

Fate and victory shift ... now this way, now that way -- like a line of unarmored men under a hail of enemy arrows. — Dan Simmons

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. — Dan Simmons

But I think, and hope, that the novels can be understood and enjoyed as science fiction, on their own terms. — Dan Simmons

Books ... were merely nodes in a near-infinite matrix of information that exists in four dimensions, evolving toward the idea of the concept of the approximation of the shadow of Truth vertically through time as well as longitudinally through knowledge. — Dan Simmons

In such seconds of decision entire futures are made. — Dan Simmons

What, after all, is more real to us than the geography of our childhoods? — Dan Simmons

Each heart has its graveyard, each household its dead, And knells ring around us wherever we tread, And the feet that awhile made our pathway so bright Pass on to a land that is out of our sight. — Dan Simmons

... all good things beyond sleep come precisely because we defy gravity while we live. — Dan Simmons

No lifetime is long enough 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

How could anyone stay sane with entire lifetimes stored in one human mind? — Dan Simmons

Mystery. The strangeness of place so necessary to some creative spirits. A perfect mixture of the classical utopia and the pagan mystery. — Dan Simmons

It is a mystery, and to tell the truth, I am intrigued by mysteries even if this is to be my last week of enjoying them. I would welcome some glimmer of understanding but, failing that, working on the puzzle will suffice. — Dan Simmons

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. — Dan Simmons

Merely to live without a pain Is little gladness, little gain, Ah, welcome joy tho' mixt with grief-- The thorn-set flower that crowns the leaf. — Dan Simmons

Power: a currency that never went out of style. — Dan Simmons

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

It occurs to me that our survival may depend upon our talking to one another. — Dan Simmons

The whole planet reeks of mysticism without revelation. — Dan Simmons

The never-ending competition between writers hasn't changed between 1868 and 2000. I used to belong to writers' workshops with other professionals, but that becomes impossible after a while. Everyone's on a different step of the career ladder. Jealousy doesn't have to erupt into murder and burying someone in Wells Cathedral, but it is always there. — Dan Simmons

Any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principal which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being evil. — Dan Simmons

Luckily, even as a young man not yet become himself, John Bridgens had two things besides indecision that kept him from self-destruction - books and a sense of irony. — Dan Simmons

The 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

Mobs have passions, not brains. — Dan Simmons

The powerful have received their share of the world's attention even when their power has been shown as sheer evil. The victim's remain the faceless masses. Numbers. Mass graves. These monsters have fertilized our century with the mass graves of their victims and it is time that the powerless had names and faces -- and voices. — Dan Simmons

We are not the only avatars of humanity. Once our computing machines achieved self-consciousness, they became part of this design. — Dan Simmons

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

As long as my sixth graders showed an average improvement of five years, the principal and district pretty much left me alone to create my own curriculum and teach whatever I wanted. — Dan Simmons

Sometimes ... dreams are all that separate us from the machines. — Dan Simmons

The sum of the crowd's IQ was far below that of its most modest single member. Mobs have passions, not brains. — Dan Simmons

Losing our ignorance can be dangerous because our ignorance is a shield. — Dan Simmons

Context is to data what water is to a dolphin — Dan Simmons

Words are the light and sound of our existence, the heat lightning by which the night is illuminated. — Dan Simmons

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

Artists recognize other artists as soon as the pencil begins to move. — Dan Simmons

Every 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

Religion seems to have always offered us that false duality ... the silences of infinite space or the cozy comfort of inner certainty. — Dan Simmons

You treat violence as an aberration ... when in truth it is the norm. It is the very essence of the human condition. — Dan Simmons

Words were like objects, making the idea more solid -- less a poisonous gas and more a ... cube of crystallized thought. — Dan Simmons

Once evolution gets a good basic design, it tends to throw away the variants and concentrate on the near-infinite diversity within that design. — Dan Simmons

War must never be a condition but, rather, a temporary scourge which we suffer as a child does a fever, knowing that health follows the long night of pain and that peace is health. — Dan Simmons

The Victorians, they were like the Germans in World War II. They could not stop recording details about their lives and their age. — Dan Simmons

Barbarians, we call them, while all the while we timidly cling to our Web like Visigoths crouching in the ruins of Rome's faded glory and proclaim ourselves civilized. — Dan Simmons

Speaking as a novelist myself, I know that members of our profession live in our imaginations as much or more as we inhabit what people call 'the real world. — Dan Simmons

His imagination was always more real than the reality of daily life. — Dan Simmons

Pain is an interesting and off-putting thing. Few if any things in life concentrate our attention so completely and terribly, and few things are more boring to listen to or read about. — Dan Simmons

We are all eaters of souls. — Dan Simmons

There is a certain solipsism to serious illness which claims all of one's attention as certainly as an astronomical black hole seizes anything unlucky enough to fall within its critical radius. — Dan Simmons

All violence flows from the same source ... the need for power. Power is the only true morality ... the only deathless god, and the appetite for violence is its only commandment. — Dan Simmons

Human beings have only that confusing mass of chemically driven neurological storage to rely on. They're all subjective and emotion-tinged. How can they trust any of their memories? — Dan Simmons

The best advice that an accomplished writer could give a beginning writer is probably, "Find your slide and then grease it." Almost every writer that wants a rewarding career, in terms of money and status and number of readers, finally finds a certain genre or certain style that he or she sticks with until reaching a critical mass of readership. And I've violated this from the get-go. — Dan Simmons

I'm very interested in the evolution of technology, and it's really the idea of artificial life which intrigues me, more than just intelligence - a new, evolving life form arising within our datasphere and coming into living relation with humanity. — Dan Simmons

The shortest route to courage is absolute ignorance. — Dan Simmons

It no longer matters who consider themselves the masters of events. Events no longer obey their masters. — Dan Simmons

I know what cancer was. How is it like humankind?" Sek Hardeen's perfectly modulated, softly accented tones showed a hint of agitation. "We have spread out through the galaxy like cancer cells through a living body, Duré. We multiply without thought to the countless life forms that must die or be pushed aside so that we may breed and flourish. We eradicate competing forms of intelligent life. — Dan Simmons

If everyone could understand the working of a psychopath's mind, we undoubtedly would be closer to insanity ourselves. — Dan Simmons

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. — Dan Simmons

Nothing helps an artist's career more than a little death and obscurity. — Dan Simmons

Most of us do know we have no immortality. And when you've found a genius, someone who has already purchased his immortality in musical or literary terms, it's maddening. — Dan Simmons

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

Laws had a bad habit of being ignored or abrogated when societal push came to totalitarian shove. — Dan Simmons

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

Evolution brings human beings. Human beings, through a long and painful process, bring humanity. — Dan Simmons

Its hard to die. Harder to live — Dan Simmons

The pack of media brayed and bellowed outside the house for seven weeks. Sol realized then 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". — Dan Simmons

Life Lessons by Dan Simmons

1. Dan Simmons teaches us to think outside the box and take risks when it comes to storytelling. He often blends genres and uses unique narrative techniques to create captivating stories.
2. He also emphasizes the importance of research, as many of his works draw from real-world events and history.
3. Lastly, Simmons encourages readers to explore the depths of their imagination, as his works often explore themes of the supernatural and the unknown.