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0b3c080
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PAHA SAPA PULLS HIS HAND BACK SHARPLY BUT NOT BEFORE HE feels the rattlesnake-strike shock of the dying Wasicun's ghost leaping into his fingers and flowing up his arm and into his chest. The boy lurches back in horror as the ghost burns its way up through his veins and bones like so much surging venom.
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Dan Simmons |
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c070b92
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Look," said Lamia, "what good would telling each other stories do? When we meet the Shrike, we tell it what we want, one of us is granted the wish, and the others die. Correct?"
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Dan Simmons |
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a231d66
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Well, nothing helps an artist's career more than a little death and obscurity, I always say.
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Dan Simmons |
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c68c296
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For our race to achieve the true satori, for us to move to that next level of consciousness and evolution that so many of our philosophies proclaim, all facets of human endeavor must become conscious strivings for art.
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Dan Simmons |
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55a28d9
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America, he thought, and not for the first time, is a nation with huge dreams and not infrequently the ability to realize them.
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Dan Simmons |
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fa204af
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Human philosophy tends to shake down into values which might be categorized as intellectual, religious, moral, and aesthetic.
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Dan Simmons |
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cbba76c
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Hunt shook his head and quit writing. "I don't understand. You can become this ... messiah ... by leaving your deathbed?" The pale oval of Keats's face moved back and forth on the pillow in a motion which might have been a substitute for laughter. "We all could have, Hunt. Humankind's folly and greatest pride. We accept our pain. We make way for our children. That earned us the right to become the God we dreamed of."
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Dan Simmons |
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413305d
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Henry James hated epilogues and refused to use them in his fiction. He said that life granted us no "epilogues", so why should art or literature?"
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Dan Simmons |
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7bd528a
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Clemens laughed until he began coughing again. "Don't you see, James?" he said at last. "You and I are only minor characters in this story about the Great Detective. Our little lives and endings mean nothing to the God-Writer, whoever the sonofabitch might be."
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Dan Simmons |
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80911fe
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Doomed with enfeebled carcass to outstretch His loathed existence through ten centuries,
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Dan Simmons |
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1accc1f
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America was a nation that refused to grow up. It was a perpetual baby, a vast, pink, fleshy toddler, now in possession of some terrible weapons it did not know how to hold properly, much less use properly.
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Dan Simmons |
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7698184
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All spirits are enslaved which serve things evil.
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devil
evil
sin
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Dan Simmons |
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a20bbb6
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They lay together in a sheltered place among the ruins of Brasilia while deathbeams from Chinese EMVs played like blue searchlights on broken ceramic walls.
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war
poetry
poetic-prose
sci-fi
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Dan Simmons |
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657ccaf
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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.
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Dan Simmons |
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71bd3a7
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A less-enlightened personage once asked Ummon What is the God-nature/Buddha/Central Truth> Ummon answered him A dried shit-stick]
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Dan Simmons |
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2d5294e
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the difference between finding the right word as opposed to accepting the almost right word was the difference between being struck by lightning and merely watching a lightning display.
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Dan Simmons |
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43175ce
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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
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Dan Simmons |
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146b938
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But this is human life: the war, the deeds, The disappointment, the anxiety, Imagination's struggles, far and nigh, All human; bearing in themselves this good, That they are still the air, the subtle food, To make us feel existence, and to show How quiet death is. Where soil is men grow, Whether to weeds or flowers; but for me, There is no depth to strike in
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Dan Simmons |
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63dd270
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Martin Silenus made an expansive gesture. "I was baptized a Lutheran," he said. "A subset which no longer exists. I helped create Zen Gnosticism before any of your parents were born. I have been a Catholic, a revelationist, a neo-Marxist, an interface zealot, a Bound Shaker, a satanist, a bishop in the Church of Jake's Nada, and a dues-paying subscriber to the Assured Reincarnation Institute. Now, I am happy to say, I am a simple pagan." He..
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Dan Simmons |
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072157b
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Aenea nodded. "It's wonderful to preserve tradition, but a healthy organism evolves ... culturally and physically."
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Dan Simmons |
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7a74705
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This is all too important." Aenea smiled. "It's all too important. That's the damned problem, isn't it?" She turned her face back to the stars."
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Dan Simmons |
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030655e
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He sits in the straight-backed chair next to the bed and lifts a cooling cup of tea. "If you die, what happens to me?" "I don't know," I say honestly. "If I die, I don't even know what happens to me."
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Dan Simmons |
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e2f57ba
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In the end, it doesn't matter a damn bit. We thought we were special, opening our perceptions, honing our empathy, spilling that cauldron of shared pain onto the dance floor of language and then trying to make a minuet out of all that chaotic hurt. It doesn't matter a damn bit. We're no avatars, no sons of god or man. We're only us, scribbling our conceits alone, reading alone, and dying alone. Goddamn it hurts.
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Dan Simmons |
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abc9a7f
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Have you always used a pen?" "No," I said, "only when I want to write something worth reading."
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Dan Simmons |
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ded2b85
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This is some sort of joke, isn't it?" asks Hunt, staring at the flawless blue sky and distant fields. I cough as lightly and briefly as possible into a handkerchief I have made from a towel borrowed from the inn. "Possibly," I say. "But then, what isn't?"
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Dan Simmons |
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03daab2
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Sacrifice and the agreement to sacrifice had written human history in blood.
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Dan Simmons |
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5ba8797
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Jehovah had not simply been testing Abraham, but had communicated in the only language of loyalty, obedience, sacrifice, and command that humankind could understand at that point in the relationship.
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Dan Simmons |
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6520dc0
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Le disgustaba morir, y no queria morir mas de lo necesario.
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Dan Simmons |
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57c030c
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For seven centuries the existence of Grand Unification Theories and hyperstring post-quantum physics and Core-given understanding of the universe as self-contained and boundless, without Big Bang singularities or corresponding endpoints, had pretty much eliminated any role of God--primitively anthropomorphic or sophisticatedly post-Einsteinian--even as a caretaker or pre-Creation former of rules. The modern universe, as machine and man had ..
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science
metaphysics
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Dan Simmons |
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caeff4b
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Then the young men, streaming blood on their painted chests and backs, would stand and begin their dancing and chanting, leaning back from or toward the sacred tree so that their bodies were often suspended totally by the rawhide and horn under their muscles. And always they stared at the sun as they danced and chanted. Sometimes they danced the full two days. More often, they would dance and leap until the pain caused them to fall unconsci..
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Dan Simmons |
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8dc891d
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Mother's estate--our estate--a thousand acres centered in a million more. Lawns the size of small prairies with grass so perfect it beckoned a body to lie on it, to nap on its soft perfection. Noble shade trees making sundials of the Earth, their shadows circling in stately procession; now mingling, now contracting to midday, finally stretching eastward with the dying of the day. Royal oak. Giant elms. Cottonwood and cypress and redwood and..
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Dan Simmons |
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80d1804
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In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was programmed in classic binary. And the Word said, "Let there be life!" And so, somewhere in the TechnoCore vaults of my mother's estate, frozen sperm from my long-dead daddy was defrosted, set in suspension, shaken like the vanilla malts of yore, loaded into something part squirt gun and part dildo, and--at the magic touch of a trigger--ejaculated into Mother at a time when the moon was full an..
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Dan Simmons |
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e793ee1
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I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember'd.
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Dan Simmons |
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22c9d5b
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God Almighty, I love life. Even this vile place, where the trees are shattered stubs and where nothing grows but craters, even the sights, scents, sounds, and stirrings of this place are preferable to the unchanging nothingness of the Great Darkness.
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Dan Simmons |
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a263052
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All those before us have gone into the darkness without assurance of logic or fact or persuasive theory, with only a slender thread of hope or all too shakable convention of faith. And they have been able to sustain that slim hope in the face of darkness, then so must I.
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faith
death
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Dan Simmons |
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02e7881
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Among us we represent islands of time as well as separate oceans of perspective. Or perhaps more aptly put, each of us may hold a piece to a puzzle no one else has been able to solve since humankind first landed on Hyperion.
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Dan Simmons |
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7bf6c66
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Poetry is only secondarily about words. Primarily, it is about truth.
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Dan Simmons |
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b9585e0
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There were reprints of American editorials. Liberals saw it as a resurgence of social protest and decried the discrimination, poverty, and hunger that had provoked it. Conservative columnists acidly pointed out that hungry people don't steal stereo systems first and called for a crackdown in law enforcement. All of the reasoned editorials sounded hollow in light of the perverse randomness of the event. It was as if only a thin wall of elect..
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Dan Simmons |
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e0b2666
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To be a poet, I realized, a true poet, was to become the Avatar of humanity incarnate; to accept the mantle of poet is to carry the cross of the Son of Man, to suffer the birth pangs of the Soul-Mother of Humanity. "To be a true poet is to become God." Well, Martin, old colleague, old chum, you're carrying the cross and suffering the pangs, but are you any closer to becoming God? Or do you just feel like some poor idiot who's had a three-me..
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Dan Simmons |
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5fe91fb
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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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51ad99b
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To be a true poet is to become God.
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Dan Simmons |
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b7db651
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That's all! Now either leave us alone or join us as a father rather than a receiver of sacrifices. You have the choice of Abraham!
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Dan Simmons |
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70358cf
|
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.
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Dan Simmons |
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f92f974
|
As your priest," says de Soya, "I will warn you again about the use of profanity. As your commanding officer, I order you to come up with as many surprises as you can to kill that spiked son of a bitch." They"
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Dan Simmons |