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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| d939f88 | Brawne looks at Johnny, realizing that she is seeing in infrared now as the heat-lamp light from distant furnaces of data suns bathes them both. He is still handsome. -- | Dan Simmons | ||
| 0f03c5b | Did you see any of us there?" Kassad said nothing for more than a minute. The soft sounds of the river and the ship's rigging suddenly seemed very loud. Finally Kassad took a breath. "Yes." Silence stretched again. Brawne Lamia broke it. "Will you tell us who?" "No." | Dan Simmons | ||
| f08c6f7 | Alone with the Morlocks, thought Silenus. But not even Morlocks for company in the end. Only my muse. There | Dan Simmons | ||
| f67f040 | Without conscious thought I stepped behind the altar, raised my arms, and began the celebration of the Eucharist. There was no sense of parody or melodrama in this act, no symbolism or hidden intention; it was merely the automatic reaction of a priest who had said Mass almost daily for more than forty-six years of his life and who now faced the prospect of never again participating in the reassuring ritual of that celebration. It | Dan Simmons | ||
| bf1ee31 | In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes. Francis | Dan Simmons | ||
| 837b721 | No lifetime is long enough for those who wish to create, | Dan Simmons | ||
| 6b9f2a3 | Meina Gladstone sat at the head of the long table and felt the peculiar and not-unpleasant sense of separateness which comes from far too little sleep over far too long a period. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 56188cf | At sunrise of the third day, I saw the corpse's chest begin to rise and fall and I heard the first intake of breath--a rasp like water being poured into a leather pouch. | Dan Simmons | ||
| fa82605 | It has to be your decision. The weapon is yours to use or disregard. It pains the Core to take any human life ... or, through inaction, allow any human life to come to harm. But in this case, where the lives of billions are at risk ... | Dan Simmons | ||
| 6ccaf85 | Spenser Reynolds began telling about his next project--an attempt to have suicides coordinate their leaps from bridges on a score of worlds while the All Thing watched--and Tyrena Wingreen-Feif stole all attention by putting her arm around Monsignor Edouard and inviting him to her after-dinner nude swimming party at her floating estate on Mare Infinitus. I | Dan Simmons | ||
| a61ab6e | Her head was on my shoulder and her breathing was so deep and regular that I thought her to be asleep. I was almost asleep myself when her warm hand slid up my leg and lightly cupped me. I was startled even as I began to stir and stiffen. Siri whispered an answer to my unasked question. "No, Merin, one is never really too old. At least not too old to want the warmth and closeness. You decide, my love. I will be content either way." I" | Dan Simmons | ||
| 1a72fca | Martin Silenus strides back to the dying fire. "Worse," he says. "He could be twisting on the Shrike's steel tree. Where we'll be in a few--" Brawne Lamia rises suddenly and grasps the poet by his shirtfront. She lifts him off the ground, shakes him," | Dan Simmons | ||
| 3c7e3dc | 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 principle which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being was evil. -- | Dan Simmons | ||
| 6437679 | The first Dying Earth sold three billion copies," I said. "Pilgrim's Progress," she said. "Mein Kampf. Once in a century. Maybe less." "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." | Dan Simmons | ||
| 537fb45 | The Shrike stepped closer. Silenus's hand twitched, lifted the pen again, and wrote across the empty lower margin of his last page: IT IS TIME, MARTIN. He stared at what he had written, stifling the urge to giggle insanely. To his knowledge, the Shrike had never spoken ... never communicated ... to anyone. Other than through the paired media of pain and death. "No!" he screamed again. "I have work to do. Take someone else, goddamn you!" The.. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 5d628ff | Edouard, I have spent so many hours wrestling with my faith--my lack of faith--but now, in this fearful corner of an all but forgotten world, riddled as I am with this loathsome parasite, I have somehow rediscovered a strength of belief the likes of which I have not known since you and I were boys. 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 un.. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 5035d3b | I realize now that what I was trying to do with the Armaghast data was offer the Church not a rebirth but only a transition to a false life such as these poor walking corpses inhabit. If the Church is meant to die, it must do so--but do so gloriously, in the full knowledge of its rebirth in Christ. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 77a8a38 | He'd used a ladder to get three ... maybe four meters ... up on the bole of the tree. Built a sort of platform. For his feet. Broken the arrestor rods off ... little more than spikes ... then sharpened them. Must've used a rock to drive the long one through his feet into the bestos platform and tree. "His left arm ... he'd pounded the stake between the radius and ulna ... missed veins ... just like the goddamned Romans." | Dan Simmons | ||
| 851c64a | Our apartment was filled with photos of us, notes I wrote to myself about us, holos of us on Hyperion, but ... you know. In the morning he would be an absolute stranger. By afternoon I began to believe what we'd had, even if I couldn't remember. By evening I'd be crying in his arms ... then, sooner or later, I'd go to sleep. It's better this way." Rachel" | Dan Simmons | ||
| 39fbe2b | thighs flesh rather than steel, her groin matted from the moisture of their passion. Her face is dark, the sun behind her, but he sees red flames dying in the multifaceted pits of her eyes. She smiles and he sees sunlight glint on rows of metal | Dan Simmons | ||
| 3f22d2e | For a few minutes I stood alone in her chambers, appreciating the light and silence and art. There was a van Gogh on one of the walls, worth more than most planets could pay. It was a painting of the artist's room at Arles. Madness is not a new invention. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 39bf970 | Was I a swordsman then? sends Johnny. Or a poet? [Yes There is never one without the other] | Dan Simmons | ||
| a3b0de6 | 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 | ||
| 1e5dddf | beyond ideology and ambition, beyond thought and emotion, there was only pain. And salvation from it. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 651c26b | 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. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 14dc632 | 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 | ||
| a4bd370 | Sometimes there is a thin line separating orthodox zeal from apostasy," said Father Lenar Hoyt. So began the priest's story." | Dan Simmons | ||
| 0b3c080 | 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. | Dan Simmons | ||
| c070b92 | 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?" | Dan Simmons | ||
| a231d66 | Well, nothing helps an artist's career more than a little death and obscurity, I always say. | Dan Simmons | ||
| c68c296 | 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. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 55a28d9 | America, he thought, and not for the first time, is a nation with huge dreams and not infrequently the ability to realize them. | Dan Simmons | ||
| fa204af | Human philosophy tends to shake down into values which might be categorized as intellectual, religious, moral, and aesthetic. | Dan Simmons | ||
| cbba76c | 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." | Dan Simmons | ||
| 413305d | 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?" | Dan Simmons | ||
| 7bd528a | 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." | Dan Simmons | ||
| 80911fe | Doomed with enfeebled carcass to outstretch His loathed existence through ten centuries, | Dan Simmons | ||
| 1accc1f | 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. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 7698184 | All spirits are enslaved which serve things evil. | devil evil sin | Dan Simmons | |
| a20bbb6 | 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. | poetic-prose poetry sci-fi war | Dan Simmons | |
| 657ccaf | 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. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 71bd3a7 | A less-enlightened personage once asked Ummon What is the God-nature/Buddha/Central Truth> Ummon answered him A dried shit-stick] | Dan Simmons | ||
| 2d5294e | 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. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 43175ce | 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 | Dan Simmons |