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24cb53e
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I explained my opinion of the ship's logic. "That is a strange designation," said the ship. "While I have certain organic elements incorporated into my substructure and decentralized DNA computing components, I am not--in the strictest sense of the term--a biological organism. I have no digestive system. No need for elimination, other than the occasional waste gas and passenger effluvium. Therefore, I have no anus in either real or figurati..
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Dan Simmons |
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9402b19
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The world as we know it is ending, my friends, no matter what happens to us
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Dan Simmons |
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e2b2883
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Eagles are extinct," grumbled Morpurgo. "Perhaps they should have attacked the sky. It betrayed them."
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Dan Simmons |
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ea8387d
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pain has been with him since birth - the universe's gift to a poet ...
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universe
pain
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Dan Simmons |
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364e2cd
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My intellect was my greatest vanity.
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intellectualism
intellectuals
vanity
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Dan Simmons |
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632b560
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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
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natural-order
humankind
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Dan Simmons |
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728dabb
|
The captain of HMS Terror often thought that he knew nothing about the future - other than that his ship and Erebus would never again steam or sail - but then he reminded himself of one certainty: when his store of whiskey was gone, Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier was going to blow his brains out.
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Dan Simmons |
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ec55b0d
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You want to be a hero," he repeated. "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."
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Dan Simmons |
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79e389c
|
The only true voyage, the only Fountain of Youth," recited Orphu, "would be found not in traveling to strange lands but in having different eyes, in seeing the universe with the eyes of another person, of a hundred others, and seeing the hundred universes each of them sees, which each of them is." --
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Dan Simmons |
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2693cb3
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Sometimes there is a thin line separating orthodox zeal from apostasy,' said Father Lenar Hoyt
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Dan Simmons |
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b0d3b92
|
The only true voyage, the only Fountain of Youth," recited Orphu, "would be found not in traveling to strange lands but in having different eyes, in seeing the universe with the eyes of another person, of a hundred others, and seeing the hundred universes each of them sees, which each of them is."
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Dan Simmons |
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2ec1aff
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The essence of honor lay in the moment of combat between equals.
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Dan Simmons |
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3669534
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The universe deepened at that moment, the music of the spheres grew from a mere chorus to a symphony as triumphant as Beethoven's Ninth, and I knew that I would always be able to hear it when I wished or needed to, always be able to Use it to take the step I needed to see the one I loved, or, failing that, step to the place where I had been with the one I loved, or, failing that, find a place to love for its own beauty and richness. The ene..
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Dan Simmons |
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f26da15
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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.
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Dan Simmons |
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0d8b3fb
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Very few conversations with Charles Dickens did not include a laugh from him. I had never met a man so given to laughter. Almost no moment or context was too serious for this author not to find some levity in it, as some of us had discovered to our embarrassment at funerals.
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humor
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Dan Simmons |
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a3f97da
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Quality wine, Scotch, and coffee had been the three irreplaceable commodities after the death of Old Earth.
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Dan Simmons |
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715be34
|
sounding now/old songs/deep water/no-Great Voices/no-Shark/old songs/new songs
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hyperion
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Dan Simmons |
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b2906ad
|
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. My three local years on Heaven's Gate, almost fifteen hundred standard days, allowed me to see, to feel, to hear - to remember, as if I literally had been born again. Little matter that I had been born again in hell.
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Dan Simmons |
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469a481
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Why does our species always have to take our full measure of God-given misery and terror and mortality and then make it worse?
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Dan Simmons |
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acd79d3
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I nevertheless understood at that second the ancient obsession of the God-fearing for another kind of fear: the thrill of exorcism, the mindless whirl of Dervish possession, and the almost erotic surrender of seance, speaking in tongues, and Zen Gnostic trance. I realized at that instant just how surely the affirmation of demons or the summoning of Satan somehow can affirm the reality of their mystic antithesis -the God of Abraham.
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Dan Simmons |
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d0fafe7
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No one wants to pay for a look at another person's angst.
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Dan Simmons |
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9fd9444
|
In the beginning was the Word. In the end . . . past honor, past life, past caring . . . In the end will be the Word.
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Dan Simmons |
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d956a8d
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There is something about raising a child that helps to sharpen one's sense of what is real.
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Dan Simmons |
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6147d50
|
The Void Which Binds] 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.
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philosophical
science-fiction
satirical
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Dan Simmons |
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a069c81
|
They made love then. Kassad, at twenty-three standard years, had been in love once and had enjoyed sex many times. He thought he knew the way and the why of it. There was nothing in his experience to that moment which he could not have described with a phrase and a laugh to his squadmates in the hold of a troop transport. With the calm, sure cynicism of a twenty-three-year-old veteran he was sure that he would experience anything that cou..
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Dan Simmons |
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26dc732
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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.
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Dan Simmons |
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3cb32a5
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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. Example: the Chinese pictogram for 'integrity' is a two-part symbol of a man literally standing next to his word. So far, so good. But what does the Late English word 'honesty' mean? Or 'Mo..
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meaning
honesty
language
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Dan Simmons |
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8fb6dbf
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I will not try to describe the beauty of life in a Swarm - their zero-gravity globe cities and comet farms and thrust clusters, their micro-orbital forests and migrating rivers and the ten thousand colors and textures of life at Rendezvous Week. Suffice it to say that I believe the Ousters have done what Web humanity has not in the past millennia: evolved. While we live in our derivative cultures, pale reflections of Old Earth life, the Ous..
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Dan Simmons |
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1314415
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She [Beatrice] alone was still real for him, still implied meaning in the world, and beauty. Her nature became his landmark - what Melville would call, with more sobriety than we can now muster, his Greenwich Standard ...
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meaning
love
compass
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Dan Simmons |
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581439c
|
Sometimes there is no hope," whispered Das. "There's always some hope, Mr. Das." "No, Mr. Luczak, there is not. Sometimes there is only pain. And acquiescence to pain. And, perhaps, defiance at the world which demands such pain." "Defiance is a form of hope, is it not, sir?"
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Dan Simmons |
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f7f595f
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I desperately want to talk to her now. I want to ask her who it was who so deftly crafted and shaped the legend that was our love.
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love-story
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Dan Simmons |
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e7be060
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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.
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Dan Simmons |
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72401ab
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For those who do not write and who never have been stirred by the creative urge, talk of muses seems a figure of speech, a quaint conceit, but for those of us who live by the Word, our muses are as real and necessary as the soft clay of language which they help to sculpt.
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Dan Simmons |
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35d8c4a
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The young remember most deeply
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Dan Simmons |
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fe2a917
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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.
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Dan Simmons |
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2f44f02
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How do I know what I think until I see what I say?
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Dan Simmons |
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a13c983
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He was, in other words, a careful man with careless impulses.
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Dan Simmons |
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3c1fce4
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Francis Crozier now understood that the most desirable and erotic thing a woman could wear were the many modest layers such as Sophia Cracroft wore to dinner in the governor's house, enough silken fabric to conceal the lines of her body, allowing a man to concentrate on the exciting loveliness of her wit
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arctic
hms-terror
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Dan simmons |
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ade6ba7
|
The cruciform does not like pain. Nor do I but, like the cruciform, I am willing to use it to serve my purposes. And I will do so consciously, not instinctively like the mindless mass of alien tissue embedded in me. This thing only seeks a mindless avoidance of death by any means. I do not wish to die, but I welcome pain and death rather than an eternity of mindless life. Life is sacred--I still hold to that as a core element of the Church'..
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Dan Simmons |
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d564047
|
I doubt if he ever confronted and acknowledged his own deeper motivations, except when they were as pure as spring water.
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Dan Simmons |
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ef9d3d1
|
But it sold three billion ..." "Look," said Tyrena. "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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8694afe
|
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.
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Dan Simmons |
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08923bd
|
at that moment, the sum of the crowd's IQ was far below that of its most modest single member. Mobs have passions, not brains.
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Dan Simmons |
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e04dce6
|
It was fucking wonderful. It was fucking hell.
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Dan Simmons |