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a7c7ff4
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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 con..
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sex
inspiration
religion
happiness
love
connection
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Dan Simmons |
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a83a234
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It occurs to me that our survival may depend upon our talking to one another.
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inspirational
networking
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Dan Simmons |
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51dc181
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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.
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Dan Simmons |
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fb3bb48
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To be a is to become God. I tried to explain this to my friends on Heaven's Gate. 'Piss, shit,' I said. 'Asshole motherfucker, goddamn shit goddamn. Cunt. Pee-pee cunt. Goddamn!' They shook their heads and smiled, and walked away. Great poets are rarely understood in their own day.
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Dan Simmons |
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e820345
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Evolution brings human beings. Human beings, through a long and painful process, bring humanity.
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Dan Simmons |
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6797bc3
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The shortest route to courage is absolute ignorance.
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ignorance
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Dan Simmons |
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cf9adf9
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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 which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being was evil.
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Dan Simmons |
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323869f
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In such seconds of decision entire futures are made.
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time
future
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Dan Simmons |
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876595c
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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.
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Dan Simmons |
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e59c30e
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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.
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Dan Simmons |
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c3570cb
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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, Dure. 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."
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overpopulation
superiority-complex
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Dan Simmons |
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e53f0f9
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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.
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beauty-in-nature
sunshine
flowers
sunlight
summer
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Dan Simmons |
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07f42f2
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There is a fullness and calmness there which can come only from knowing pain.
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pain
experience
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Dan Simmons |
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dcc49f5
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Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers.
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Dan Simmons |
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5c9fe72
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I loved you backward and forward in time. I loved you beyond boundaries of time and space.
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time-travel
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Dan Simmons |
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33d3b20
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Rage. Sing, O Muse, of the rage of Achilles, of Peleus' son, murderous, man-killer, fated to die, sing of the rage that cost the Achaeans so many good men and sent so many vital, hearty souls down to the dreary House of Death. And while you're at it, Muse, sing of the rage of the gods themselves, so petulant and so powerful here on their new Olympos, and of the rage of the post-humans, dead and gone though they might be, and of the rage of ..
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Dan Simmons |
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e5b85ea
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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 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..
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life
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Dan Simmons |
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8d7966f
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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.
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irony
self-destruction
salvation
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Dan Simmons |
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2236f0b
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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."
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Dan Simmons |
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caff2b3
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Mobs have passions, not brains.
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passion
mobs
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Dan Simmons |
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537aece
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Its hard to die. Harder to live
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living
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Dan Simmons |
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c0aa3a9
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We are all eaters of souls.
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Dan Simmons |
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73a2544
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Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion
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writing
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Dan Simmons |
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d6089a0
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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.
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Dan Simmons |
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d48c653
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When the last autumn of Dickens's life was over, he continued to work through his final winter and into spring. This is how all of us writers give away the days and years and decades of our lives in exchange for stacks of paper with scratches and squiggles on them. And when Death calls, how many of us would trade all those pages, all that squandered lifetime-worth of painfully achieved scratches and squiggles, for just one more day, one mor..
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time
writing
death
life
charles-dickens
regret
writers
old-age
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Dan Simmons |
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4f696da
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You have to live to really know things, my love
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Dan Simmons |
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6640672
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We are created for precisely this sort of suffering. In the end, it is all we are, these limpid tide pools of self-consciousness between crashing waves of pain. We are destined and designed to bear our pain with us, hugging it tight to our bellies like the young Spartan thief hiding a wolf cub so it can eat away our insides. What other creature in God's wide domain would carry the memory of you, Fanny, dust these nine hundred years, and all..
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Dan Simmons |
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1465a69
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It no longer matters who consider themselves the masters of events. Events no longer obey their masters.
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obeying
puppeteers
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Dan Simmons |
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dd9b73c
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This is every writer's nightmare--the sudden breakdown of meaning in the language that sustains and supports us...
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Dan Simmons |
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04f3c37
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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.
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Dan Simmons |
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a1c9b55
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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.
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Dan Simmons |
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699b1c0
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Who was Hitler?' I said. Tyrena smiled slightly. 'An Old Earth politician who did some writing.
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Dan Simmons |
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9e7346d
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Francis Crozier believes in nothing. . It has no plan, no point, no hidden mysteries that make up for the oh-so-obvious miseries and banalities. Nothing he has learned in the past six months has persuaded him otherwise. Has it?
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life
brutish
francis-rawdon-moira-crozier
hidden-mysteries
hobbe-s-leviathan
miseries
solitary
short
nasty
belief
poor
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Dan Simmons |
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de407cd
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H]istory viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.
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Dan Simmons |
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8725c2f
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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.
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politics
leadership
zeitgeist
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Dan Simmons |
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d3d41e2
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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.
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evolution
indifference
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Dan Simmons |
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ecfe345
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The day is perfect and I hate it for being so.
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Dan Simmons |
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eb02c0f
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all good things beyond sleep come precisely because we defy gravity while we live.
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sleep
life
good-things
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Dan Simmons |
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437447a
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A philosopher/mathematician named Bertrand Russell who lived and died in the same century as Gass once wrote: "Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it." Here is the essence of mankind's creative genius: not the edifices of civilization nor the bang-flash weapons which can end it, but the words which fertilize new concepts like spermatazoa attacking an ovum." --
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Dan Simmons |
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2903453
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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.
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Dan Simmons |
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47f6852
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a society devoted to self-destruction and waste but unwilling to acknowledge its indulgent ways.
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indulgence
self-destruction
|
Dan Simmons |
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64d7b1e
|
Nobody gets beyond a petroleum economy. Not while there's petroleum there.
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Dan Simmons |
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f7a3d3e
|
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'...
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Dan Simmons |
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6da1cda
|
Context is to data what water is to a dolphin
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Dan Simmons |