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80d4ede
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Finding a woman like that amidst the herd of half-feeling, half-caring, half-responding, females in our society of 1860's England was not so much like finding a diamond in the rough as it was finding a warm responsive body amidst the cold dead forms on slabs in the Paris morgue that Dickens had so enjoyed taking me to.
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Dan Simmons |
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7d6fac3
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This is where the Iliad begins, and it should be the focus of all my energies and professional skills, but the truth is that I don't really give a shit.
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Dan Simmons |
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0ad17b4
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primitive times had required primitive obedience, that later generations evolved to the point where parents offered themselves as sacrifice - as in the dark knights of the ovens which pocked old earth history - and that current generations had to deny any command for sacrifice. Sol had written that whatever God now took in human consciousness - whether as a mere manifestation of the subconscious in all its revanchist needs or as a more cons..
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god
philosophy
obedience
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Dan Simmons |
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bcc7cc6
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The silence stretched. Finally Al added one more sentence that I have been thinking about ever since. 'And if you did it again,' he said, 'we would have to kill you again.' We stared at each other for some time after that; each convinced, I am sure, that the other was a total idiot.
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Dan Simmons |
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8222778
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Johnny sighed in the darkness. "I don't understand the exact purpose of the Keats Project or the other Old Earth analogs, but I suspect that it is part of a TechnoCore project going back at least seven standard centuries to realize the Ultimate Intelligence." "The Ultimate Intelligence," I said, exhaling smoke. "Uh-huh. So the TechnoCore is trying to... what?... to build God." "Yes."
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Dan Simmons |
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9c66fe5
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I remembered Grandam telling me about an early Old Earth scientist, one Charles Darwin, who had come up with one of the early theories of evolution or gravitation or somesuch, and how--although raised a devout Christian even before the reward of the cruciform--he had become an atheist while studying a terrestrial wasp that paralyzed some large species of spider, planted its embryo, and let the spider recover and go about its business until ..
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Dan Simmons |
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cb06f43
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Yes. But terrible heresies have proven to be grim truths many times before in the longer history of my Church, Sek Hardeen.
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religion
truth
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Dan Simmons |
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16934bf
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Nothing had ever been so welcome by its absence.
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Dan Simmons |
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ed1b153
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And then Kassad was being helped out of his simulation creche at the Olympus Command School and the other cadets and instructors were rising, talking, laughing with one another--all seemingly unaware that the world had changed forever.
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Dan Simmons |
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e36e05a
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The Hegemony had known how to treat cancer, but most of the gene-tailoring knowledge and technology had been lost after the Fall.
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Dan Simmons |
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bc21b57
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Why . . ." she begins. "Why do you want to climb it?" "Because it's there."
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Dan Simmons |
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7db288e
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It is true that we Russians have sent only four doctors into space in forty years of flight, but still I might have had chance to fly to Mir or International Space Station except for one fact. This is that I cannot urinate--is this the right word, Mr. Roth?--I cannot urinate on wheel of bus.
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Dan Simmons |
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a2225e8
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Commander Lebedev wrote--'After a communication session we invited Flight Engineer Savitskaya to the heavily laden table. We gave Sveta a blue floral print apron and told her, " 'Look, Sveta, even though you are a pilot and cosmonaut, you are still a woman first. Would you please do us the honor of being our hostess tonight?' " "Ouch," says Roth"
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Dan Simmons |
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a70734d
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I'm hungry, Raul," she said from the head of the stairs. "Want to go down and see what this old ship's galley can whomp up for lunch?"
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Dan Simmons |
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53a4387
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Sol! Take your daughter, your only daughter Rachel, Whom you love, and go to the world called Hyperion and offer her there as a burnt offering at one of the places of which I shall tell you." Sol hesitated and looked back to Rachel. The baby's eyes were deep and luminous as she looked up at her father. Sol felt the unspoken yes. Holding her tightly, he stepped forward into the darkness and raised his voice against the silence: "Listen! Ther..
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Dan Simmons |
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e069a72
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Designed from DNA to compute," I said, appalled at the thought of Core machines being given the benefit of the doubt when it came to souls."
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Dan Simmons |
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3e26939
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The day before the Queen's Ball, Father had a visitor--a very young girl with literary aspirations, someone Lord Lytton had recommended visit Father and sent over-and while Father was explaining to her the enjoyment he was having in writing this Drood book for serialisation, this upstart of a girl had the temerity to ask, 'But suppose you died before all the book was written?' [...] He spoke very softly in his kindest voice and said to her,..
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writing
work
death
charles-dickens
old-age
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Dan Simmons |
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11102fc
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Odd how the daily imperatives persist even in the face of collective disaster.
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Dan Simmons |
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e74ac37
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In the months since Challenger, Baedecker had found it hard to believe that the country had ever flown so frequently and competently into space. The long hiatus of earthbound doubt in which nothing flew had become the normal state of things to Baedecker, mixing in his own mind with a dreary sense of heaviness, of entropy and gravity triumphant.
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Dan Simmons |
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8459210
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Sol! Take your daughter, your only daughter, Rachel, whom you love, and go to the world called Hyperion and offer her there as a burnt offering at one of the places of which I shall tell you.
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Dan Simmons |
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1b99699
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it had long been accepted that if a species put mankind on its food-chain menu the species would be extinct before long.
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Dan Simmons |
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810bef6
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We've been stuck in one species since our Cro-Magnon ancestors helped to wipe out the smarter Neanderthals," she said. "Now it's our chance to diversify rapidly, and institutions like the Hegemony, the Pax, and the Core are stopping it."
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Dan Simmons |
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a5ee2b8
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Aenea heard the music of the spheres. She resonated with the Void Which Binds, which resonates in turn to sentient life and thought, and then she used the almost illimitable energy of the Void to ... to take the first step.
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Dan Simmons |
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b607992
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But as long as the task is both onerous and repetitive, I discovered, the mind is not only free to wander to more imaginative climes, it actually flees to higher planes.
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Dan Simmons |
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d716db4
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Thou art a dreaming thing; A fever of thyself--think of the Earth; What bliss even in hope is there for thee? What haven? every creature hath its home; Every sole man hath days of joy and pain, Whether his labours be sublime or low-- The pain alone; the joy alone; distinct: Only the dreamer venoms all his days, Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve.
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Dan Simmons |
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aa07e04
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Here's the deal. Willi's bought the rights to a paperback best-seller called The White Slaver. It's a piece of formulized shit written for illiterate fourteen-year-olds and the kind of lobotomized housewife that lines up to buy the new Harlequin romances each month. Jack-off material for intellectual quadriplegics. Naturally it sold about three million copies. We
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Dan Simmons |
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80630a3
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Love was as hardwired into the structure of the universe as gravity and matter.
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universe
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Dan Simmons |
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41426a9
|
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.
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Dan Simmons |
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c910a66
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all good things beyond sleep come precisely because we defy gravity while we live. Besides, somewhere in the basement of The Jolly Corner to this day, mildewing amidst the pages of an equally mildewed paperback, is a 3-x-5 card on which I had scribbled this quote from Flaubert: Books aren't made the way babies are: they are made like pyramids. There's some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other..
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Dan Simmons |
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8fc3e6b
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For a person born and raised into a world where information was always at hand, communication with anyone anywhere a given, and no distance more than a farcaster step away, this sudden regression to life as our ancestors had known it would be like suddenly awakening blind and crippled.
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Dan Simmons |
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c623d9b
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Forcing school children to recite a national pledge doesn't sound very American to me," said James. "No," agreed Holmes. "It sounds German. Very German."
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Dan Simmons |
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0cc5821
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It seemed that Abraham had offered to murder his son to test a phantom. It seemed that Sol had brought his dying daughter through hundreds of light-years and innumerable hardships in response to nothing. But now, as the Sphinx loomed above him and the first hint of sunrise paled Hyperion's sky, Sol realized that he had responded to a force more basic and persuasive than the Shrike's terror or pain's dominion. If he was right--and he did not..
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Dan Simmons |
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676eb12
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Francis Bacon once said, "There arises from a bad and unapt formation of words a wonderful obstruction to the mind."
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Dan Simmons |
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29000c2
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In an interstellar society where the Church ruled all but absolutely, news awaited not only independent confirmation but official permission to exist.
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Dan Simmons |
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f1887c7
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Tempus edax rerum.
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Dan Simmons |
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239eedf
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Old age hath yet his honour and his toil; Death closes all: but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done . . . 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world . . . Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho' We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak in time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, and not to yield.
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Dan Simmons |
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b424ce2
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Philosophical poetry by moonlight was all right, but guns that shot straight and true were a necessity.
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Dan Simmons |
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25f8366
|
Sometimes," said General Morpurgo, taking her hand, "dreams are all that separate us from the machines."
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Dan Simmons |
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ceb5a95
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Achilles pauses, looks over his shoulder at the masses of men behind him, turns back, looks past Zeus toward Olympos and the masses of gods in front of him, and then crooks his neck to look up again at towering Zeus. "Surrender now", says Achilles, "and we'll spare your goddesses' lives so they can be our slaves and courtesans."
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Dan Simmons |
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2454d5a
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In his twenties, John Bridgens most identified with Hamlet. The strangely aging Prince of Denmark--Bridgens was quite sure that the boy Hamlet had magically aged over a few theatrical weeks to a man who was, at the very least, in his thirties by Act V--had been suspended between thought and deed, between motive and action, frozen by a consciousness so astute and unrelenting that it made him think about everything, even thought itself.
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Dan Simmons |
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1f0b473
|
Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. It has no plan, no point, no hidden mysteries that make up for the oh-so-obvious miseries and banalities.
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Dan Simmons |
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c2334df
|
Seduction, he knew, was both science and art--a blend of skill, discipline, proximity, and opportunity. Mostly proximity.
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Dan Simmons |
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7cd6c0d
|
He wished he were home in Charleston, listening to the Dave Brubeck Quartet on the stereo and reading Bruce Catton.
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Dan Simmons |
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fcd0071
|
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
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Dan Simmons |