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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| fd1f7ea | You'll have to ask him in the next life," said Sol tiredly. "He's dead." | Dan Simmons | ||
| e75f2db | The Consul gripped the edges of the mat with fingers gone white. He had tied the strap of his duffel bag around his belt, otherwise the bag would have tumbled off to a glacier far below. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 31c2b93 | The Consul dozed, snapping awake each time with a sense of falling, hands gripping the edge of the rigid hawking mat. He realized that he should have tied himself in with the single rope he had brought in his bag, but he didn't want to land--the | Dan Simmons | ||
| 26f8967 | 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 universe ruled by unfeeling laws and totally indifferent to the small, reasoning beings that inhabit it. Day | Dan Simmons | ||
| 062cb0a | Trusting in Theo--quiet, efficient Theo--to get him through the morning. Trusting in luck to get him through the day. Trusting in the drinking at Cicero's to get him through the night. Trusting in the unimportance of his posting to get him through life. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 64384da | You said seventy million were planned," I said. "Yeah, well, we changed our minds after Transline's resident AI read it." I slumped lower in the flowfoam. "Even the AI hated it?" "The AI loved it," said Tyrena. "That's when we knew for sure that people were going to hate it." | Dan Simmons | ||
| d4ef5a7 | Dying Earth II sold nineteen million copies. "Not bad," said Tyrena. "It takes awhile to build an audience." "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, .. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 408b6a9 | Ah, yes, poverty," said Chatterjee and smiled as if the word had deeply ironic connotations. "Indeed, there is much poverty here. Much squalor by Western standards. That must offend the American mind, since America has repeatedly dedicated its great will to eliminating poverty. How did your ex-President Johnson put it . . . to declare war on poverty? One would think that his war in Vietnam would have satisfied him." "The war on poverty was .. | Dan Simmons | ||
| bbd570c | 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. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 238de3d | I am tired of this city. I am tired of its pagan pretensions and false histories. Hyperion is a poet's world devoid of poetry. Keats itself is a mixture of tawdry, false classicism and mindless, boomtown energy. There are three Zen Gnostic assemblies and four High Muslim mosques in the town, but the real houses of worship are the countless saloons and brothels, the huge marketplaces handling the fiberplastic shipments from the south, and th.. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 96a1093 | But they were beautiful. When they died, rippling in rainbow colors, their many-hued messages unseen, unheard by their fleeing herdmates, the beauty of their death agony was beyond words. We sold their photoreceptive skins to Web corporations, their flesh to worlds like Heaven's Gate, and ground their bones to powder to sell as aphrodisiacs to the impotent and superstitious on a score of other colony worlds. On | Dan Simmons | ||
| 982e162 | Barbarians, we call them, while all the while we timidly cling to our Web like Visigoths crouching in the ruins of Rome's faded glory and proclaim ourselves civilized. Within | Dan Simmons | ||
| e7cffc2 | I discovered that 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 | ||
| b5eb01f | The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. I | Dan Simmons | ||
| 2da9146 | 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. When one is writing--really writing--it is as if one is given a fatline to the gods. No true poet has been able to explain the exhilaration one feels when the mind becomes.. | Dan Simmons | ||
| a50429c | wanted to know how any ethical system--much less a religion so indomitable that it had survived every evil mankind could throw at it--could flow from a command from God for a man to slaughter his son. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 7b940a8 | 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 | ||
| 7800905 | Every fatline receiver in the Web, Outback, galaxy, and universe would monitor the squirt, but only the Consul's ship could decode it. Or so she hoped. The | Dan Simmons | ||
| 8fd654e | The marvelous organic computer wedged in my skull had dumped its language content like a flawed program. The right hemisphere was not without some language--but only the most emotionally charged units of communication could lodge in that affective hemisphere; my vocabulary was now down to nine words. (This, I learned later, was exceptional, many victims of CVAs retain only two or three.) For the record, here is my entire vocabulary of manag.. | Dan Simmons | ||
| cec12cf | Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion, and | Dan Simmons | ||
| dc2c767 | Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become." Later, on his last disk to his lover the week before he died, Wu said: "Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers." | Dan Simmons | ||
| 0457ba9 | On the contrary, it made me feel that faith is all the more essential. Pain and darkness have been our lot since the Fall of Man. But 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 | ||
| f84b857 | Religion and ethics were not always--or even frequently--mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often reflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 13f345a | Abraham was testing God. By denying the sacrifice at the last moment, by stopping the knife, God had earned the right--in Abraham's eyes and the hearts of his offspring--to become the God of Abraham. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 3729660 | I miei pensieri erano come mercurio... scivolavano sempre via, prima che potessi afferrarli o sagomarli in forma coerente. | Dan Simmons | ||
| b4424b3 | THERE WILL BE nO g'URTHER MIsUsE Og' THIs CHAnnEL. YOU ARE DIsTURBIng OTHERs WHO ARE UsIng IT TO sERIOUs PURPOsE. ACCEss WILL BE REsTORED WHEn YOU UnDERsTAnD WHAT IT Is g'OR. GOODBYE. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 66313df | The firstdown team for this planet must have had a fixation on animals. Horse, Bear, Eagle. For three days we were creeping down the east coast of Equus over an irregular coastline called the Mane. We've spent the last day making the crossing of a short span of the Middle Sea to a large island called Cat Key. Today we are offloading passengers and freight at Felix, the "major city" of the island." | Dan Simmons | ||
| c63df4a | I did not forget that there was a panic button. The problem is simple--when there is real panic, one does not immediately think of buttons. The | Dan Simmons | ||
| 3e2cad0 | It says something about the type of writing I had been doing that my muse could flee without my noticing. 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. When one is writing--really writing--it is as if one is given a f.. | Dan Simmons | ||
| bb99f10 | And it was one of these observers who designed the tests and simulations carried out on Old Earth during the last three centuries of its exile in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud to better explain our species to them and measure the empathy of which we are capable. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 03c048e | Silenus's true age might be anywhere from ninety to a hundred and fifty standard years. If he were close to the latter age, the Consul knew, the odds were that the poet was quite mad. As | Dan Simmons | ||
| fa68beb | as a dozen pinpoints of fierce light expanded into ripples and shock waves of plasma explosions far out in space. "I wish we had the technology to fight God on an equal basis," he said in low, tight tones. "To beard him in his den. To fight back for all of the injustices heaped on humanity. To allow him to alter his smug arrogance or be blown to hell." Father" | Dan Simmons | ||
| 571cefd | Chudovishchnoe sushchestvo vdokhnulo v sebia dushu Khikki. No potom ono otshatnulos', potriaslo ogromnoi golovoi, razdrazhenno fyrknulo, slovno otplevyvaias' ot kakoi-to merzosti. Ono | Dan Simmons | ||
| 16fc3cf | All those before us have gone into the darkness without assurance of logic fact or persuasive theory, with only a slender thread of hope or the all too shakable convinction of faith. And if they have been able to sustain that slim hope in the face of darkness, then so must I. | death faith | Dan Simmons | |
| c80e506 | Kogda imeesh' delo s durakami, spustia kakoe-to vremia nachinaesh' ponimat' khod ikh myslei. | Dan Simmons | ||
| e6002c9 | Niemand hat je gesagt, dass das Universum normal ist. | humor | Dan Simmons | |
| 8f98e40 | 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. Thus, | Dan Simmons | ||
| 2bb02eb | This is poetry. You're writing about Heaven's Gate and the Caribou Herd, but what comes across is loneliness, displacement, angst, and a cynical look at humanity. | Dan Simmons | ||
| b6fff8c | the population of literate people has been declining steadily since Gutenberg's day. By the twentieth century, less than two percent of the people in the so-called industrialized democracies read even one book a year. And that was before the smart machines, dataspheres, and user-friendly environments. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 90eb476 | It isn't hard being a hack writer. Between Dying Earth II and Dying Earth IX, six standard years had passed relatively painlessly. My research was meager, my plots formulaic, my characters cardboard, my prose preliterate, and my free time was my own. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 5ce8d43 | the idle arrogance common to such nobodies who have just come into a small bit of power. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 15fc935 | I meant only to point out that in hopelessness there is always hope. | Dan Simmons | ||
| f73fe93 | Or the king could die. Or the horse could die. Or he could teach the horse how to talk. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 5f2ec54 | I teach him how to pair such technique with masculine or feminine caesura, or the joys of alternating iambic foot with unstressed pyrrhic, or the self-indulgence of the frequent spondee. I | Dan Simmons |