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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 146b938 | 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 | Dan Simmons | ||
| 63dd270 | 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.. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 072157b | Aenea nodded. "It's wonderful to preserve tradition, but a healthy organism evolves ... culturally and physically." | Dan Simmons | ||
| 7a74705 | 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." | Dan Simmons | ||
| 030655e | 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." | Dan Simmons | ||
| e2f57ba | 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. | Dan Simmons | ||
| abc9a7f | Have you always used a pen?" "No," I said, "only when I want to write something worth reading." | Dan Simmons | ||
| ded2b85 | 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?" | Dan Simmons | ||
| 03daab2 | Sacrifice and the agreement to sacrifice had written human history in blood. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 5ba8797 | 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. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 6520dc0 | Le disgustaba morir, y no queria morir mas de lo necesario. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 57c030c | 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 .. | metaphysics science | Dan Simmons | |
| caeff4b | 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.. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 8dc891d | 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.. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 80d1804 | 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.. | Dan Simmons | ||
| e793ee1 | I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember'd. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 22c9d5b | 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. | Dan Simmons | ||
| a263052 | 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. | death faith | Dan Simmons | |
| 02e7881 | 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. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 7bf6c66 | Poetry is only secondarily about words. Primarily, it is about truth. | Dan Simmons | ||
| b9585e0 | 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.. | Dan Simmons | ||
| e0b2666 | 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.. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 5fe91fb | 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. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 51ad99b | To be a true poet is to become God. | Dan Simmons | ||
| b7db651 | 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! | Dan Simmons | ||
| 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. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 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" | Dan Simmons | ||
| aa7476c | 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. | Dan Simmons | ||
| da28466 | ENOUGH!" bellows Zeus and not only stops Ares diatribe , but freezes every god and robot in place. "I'll hear no more whining prattle from you, Ares, you lying, two-faced, treacherous sparrowfart, you miserable excuse for a man, much less for a god." | Dan Simmons | ||
| e863b74 | He is asking us if we can truly bear hearing the story. Losing our ignorance can be dangerous because our ignorance is a shield. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 75c6cea | The charge took less than forty seconds but Kassad discovered that this was ample time for his mouth to go absolutely dry, his breathing to begin to have problems, and for his testicles to retreat completely into his body. If the rest of Kassad could have found a comparable hiding place, he would have seriously considered crawling into it. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 893af19 | I was thinking about how free of mobs recent centuries had been: to create a mob there must be public meetings, and public meetings in our time consisted of individuals communing via the All Thing or other datasphere channels; it is hard to create mob passion when people are separated by kilometers and light-years, connected only by comm lines and fatline threads. | Dan Simmons | ||
| fbe5cb7 | But Siri knew the slow pace of books and the cadences of theater under the stars. I knew only the stars. | Dan Simmons | ||
| b4c8ba5 | Crawford reacted in the fashion of small towns immemorial - some tongues wagged constantly, some people could not keep the pity and pleasure at someone else's misfortune out of their voices and gazes - but mostly the community folded its protective wings around the Weintraub family like an awkward mother bird shielding its young | Dan Simmons | ||
| 8e70a6a | The universe just does not give a shit. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 5145c07 | According to Bishop Edouard, the College of Cardinals has elected someone below the rank of monsignor for the first time in the history of the Church. This says that the new Pope is a Jesuit priest ... a certain Father Paul Dure." Dur" | Dan Simmons | ||
| 517fab5 | Poco despues del enorme exito de "La mujer de blanco", se me pregunto cual era el secreto de mi exito; yo, modestamente, le dije a mi interlocutor: 1. Busca una idea central. 2. Idea unos personajes. 3. Deja que los personajes desarrollen los incidentes. 4. Empieza la historia por el principio." | drood | Dan Simmons | |
| 3597f99 | Si un escritor se pone muy enfermo, todo se detiene. Si se muere, su "negocio" se acaba para siempre. En este sentido, la carrera de un escritor popular se parece mas a la de un famoso actor, pero hasta el actor mas famoso tiene un suplente. Un escritor no. Nadie puede sustituirle. Su voz personal lo es todo. Y esto es especialmente cierto en el caso de una escritor popular que ya esta en proceso de ser publicado por entregas en una revista.. | drood | Dan Simmons | |
| 81b98ff | No tengo que contarle que Martha siguio engordando durante cada embarazo y posteriormente. Despues de que naciera William, ella ya no fingio que pudiera despojarse del enorme peso que colgaba de su cuerpo como grandes masas de grasa. Parecia que habia abandonado el cuidado de su aspecto. Una vez escribi de Martha R. que era un bello especimen del tipo de chica que me gustaba: "La autentica chica carnosa inglesa, alimentada con carne de buey.. | drood | Dan Simmons | |
| c553be4 | Hell is also the memory of starving children in the slums of Armaghast and the smile of politicians sending boys off to die in colonial wars. | Dan Simmons | ||
| a05965d | Love, that most banal of things, that most cliched of religious motivations, had more power--Sol now knew--than did strong nuclear force or weak nuclear force or electromagnetism or gravity. Love was these other forces, Sol realized. The Void Which Binds, the subquantum impossibility that carried information from photon to photon, was nothing more or less than love. | Dan Simmons | ||
| db5af92 | Love, that most banal of things, that most cliched of religious motivations, had more power--Sol now knew--than did strong nuclear force or weak nuclear force or electromagnetism or gravity. Love was these other forces, Sol realized. The Void Which Binds, the subquantum impossibility that carried information from photon to photon, was nothing more or less than love. But could love--simple, banal love--explain the so-called anthropic princip.. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 033e4a2 | I hope that on the morning of my forty-ninth birthday, in Hemingway's last moments, he might have been thinking, if his sorrow and depression allowed him such a luxury as coherent thought, not only of his final, decisive, twelve-gauge gesture of ultimate defiance but also of any victories he had won in his long-running war against invisible enemies. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 1c354a6 | They . . . are . . . so. . . sorry, " she whispered. "The machine brings back no . . . pictures . . . only the food and air and water. It is programmed . . . as you suggested, Dem Lia . . . to eliminate infestations. They are . . . so . . . so . . . sorry for the loss of Ouster life. They offer the suicide of . . . of their species . . . if it would atone for the destruction." | Dan Simmons |