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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 46594fb | it's the mind analogy that bothers Crozier the most. Haunted and plagued by melancholia much of his life, knowing it as a secret weakness made worse by his twelve winters frozen in arctic darkness as an adult, feeling it recently triggered into active agony by Sophia Cracroft's rejection | Dan Simmons | ||
| 526cf33 | Gladstone nodded. She had been sitting casually on the edge of a massive desk which the tabloids said had once belonged to an assassinated President--not Lincoln--of the pre-Mistake USA, | Dan Simmons | ||
| 1c485fd | Most of us, I hope, have had some child or spouse or friend like Beatrice, someone who by his very nature, his seemingly innate goodness and intelligence, makes us uncomfortably conscious of our lies when we lie. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 9af1fb8 | The best lack all conviction," he thought, "while the worst are full of passionate intensity." Dur" | Dan Simmons | ||
| d86ce6c | It is hard to die. Harder to live. | Dan Simmons | ||
| fb188da | Is there another Life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be, we cannot be created for this sort of suffering." Oh, Fanny, if only you knew! 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." | Dan Simmons | ||
| d9ca7e2 | Of course it's all a game. All of the good and hard and even bad things in life are just a game. | Dan Simmons | ||
| a626a88 | The best lack all conviction," he thought, "while the worst are full of passionate intensity." | Dan Simmons | ||
| 5880ff8 | We have made some progress, thought Gladstone, despite the inertia forced upon us by the Core. Despite the near-death of science. Despite our fatal addiction to the toys granted us by our own creations. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 4241783 | androids do sleep, | Dan Simmons | ||
| 4d6b1aa | Agamemnon: "Our prayer was simple -- to raze Ilium's walls to its roots, kill its heroes, rape its women, enslave its people. Is that too much to ask?" | Dan Simmons | ||
| 86bb20b | How they must have thought their efforts and adventures over, only to have to pick up their burdens again. How often, I realized now as an adult in my standard thirties, how often that is the case in all of our lives. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 21b2092 | I wish I could help him. I wish I could help the dozens of other Sufferers - all the victims of wounds, maulings, burns, diseases, incipient malnutrition, and melancholic despair - aboard this entrapped ship and her sister ship. I wish I could help myself, for already I am showing the early signs of Nostalgia and Debility. But there is little that I - or any surgeon in the Year of Our Lord 1848 - can do. God help us all. | despair hopelessness horror the-terror | Dan Simmons | |
| 0b3de4c | I did not know if androids could dream-- | Dan Simmons | ||
| bb89814 | that winter was colder'n a crib full of witch's tits, | Dan Simmons | ||
| 390a4f7 | Meaning no disrespect, sir," says the other man, "but there's no way in the Good Lord's fucking universe that anyone can bar accidents or the unexpected." | Dan Simmons | ||
| 548101b | shortest route to courage is absolute ignorance. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 0cb4867 | suddenly. "Why do you men have to add to it? Why does our species always have to take our full measure of God-given misery and terror and mortality and then make it worse?" | Dan Simmons | ||
| bdb5ced | Planck time and Planck length," I said. "I don't remember exactly--something about combining the three fundamental constants of physics--gravity, Planck's constant, and the speed of light. I remember it gave some tiny little units of length and time." | Dan Simmons | ||
| e7a0db7 | He enjoyed the soft sound of night wind and the knowledge that he was the only boy--perhaps the only human being--out there in the dark on the windy, frozen-grass meadows on this night that smelled of coming snow, alienated from the lighted windows and the warm hearths, very aware that he was of the village but not part of it at that moment. It was a thrilling, almost erotic feeling--an illicit discovery of self separated from everyone and .. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 3b95d85 | If I should die," said I to myself, "I have left no immortal work behind me--nothing to make my friends proud of my memory--but 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 | ||
| 08039ec | I explored religions and serious drinking, finding more hope of lasting solace in the latter. | Dan Simmons | ||
| cffa50a | and | Dan Simmons | ||
| 89223b2 | Don't go, Bobby," said my friend. "It's not worth it." | Dan Simmons | ||
| b740012 | Outside the port, the slashed rock of the unnamed asteroid tumbled and spun in dynamics known only to the gods of chaos mathematics. | chaos dynamics god gods-of-chaos mathematics | Dan Simmons | |
| 6cfb757 | suddenly understood perfectly why Abraham had agreed to sacrifice Isaac, his son, when the Lord commanded him to do so. It was not obedience. It was not even to put the love of God above the love of his son. 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. Sol | Dan Simmons | ||
| eaf2e9e | vise, | Dan Simmons | ||
| 7546b09 | Humanity had become as blase about sharing their lives with potential AI monitoring as pre-Civil War Old Earth USA-southern families had been about speaking in front of their human slaves. | Dan Simmons | ||
| cb1896e | Reading your sonnets?" asked Orphu. Mahnmut closed the book. "How'd you know? Have you taken up telepathy now that you've lost your eyes?" "Not yet," rumbled the Ionian. Orphu's great crab shell was lashed to the deck ten meters from where Mahnmut sat near the bow. "Some of your silences are more literary than others, is all." | silence sonnets | Dan Simmons | |
| 1841fba | feels the same about life - that involvement with it is like the Catholic Communion only the World is the Host, and it must be chewed. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 1d4765f | tourists smelling of UV lotion and cannabis. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 202ac6d | Have you ever noticed how on a trip--even a very long one--it is often the first week or so that stands out most clearly in your memory? Perhaps it is the enhanced perception that voyages bring, or perhaps it is an effect of orientation response on the senses, or perhaps it is simply that even the charm of newness soon wears off, but it has been my experience that the first days in a new place, or seeing new people, often set the tone for t.. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 44529dc | Weltschmerz | Dan Simmons | ||
| c799194 | And yet for all that I still had never gotten used to the breathtaking impermanence of things. | Michael Chabon | ||
| 0d04135 | Even in the still shadowed places, glowbirds nestled like Japanese lanterns above lighted walkways, glowing swingvines, and illuminated hanging bridges, while fireflies from Old Earth and radiant gossamers from Maui-Covenant blinked and coded their way through labyrinths of leaves, mixing with constellations sufficiently to fool even the most starwise traveler. | Dan Simmons | ||
| e40d889 | A thin line of beard along his jawline served to accent the sharpness of his countenance as surely as blood on a knife blade. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 0f4c496 | May there not be superior beings amused with any graceful, though instinctive attitude my mind may fall into, as I am entertained with the alertness of a Stoat or the anxiety of a Deer? Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine ... By a superior being our reasonings may take the same tone--though erroneous they may be fine-- This is the very thing in which consists poetry ..." --JOHN KEATS.. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 32be75d | Francis Crozier believes in nothing. 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. Nothing he has learned in the last six months has persuaded him otherwise. Has it? | Dan Simmons | ||
| 84c0f74 | Thomas Blanky wondered if he had been an instrument of evil -- or perhaps just of folly -- when he had used his more than three decades of ice-master skills to get 126 men the impossible 250 miles through ice to this place where all they could do was die | death evil folly ice sailing ship skill | Dan Simmons | |
| 8fbc3a9 | Black man invented plasma. Fellow named Charles Drew. I read somewhere that he bled to death after a car accident in the nineteen fifties because some cracker North Carolina hospital didn't have any 'Negro blood' in the fridge and refused to give him 'white blood. | Dan Simmons | ||
| 95ef5db | My chin is titanium, my fists are uranium, I don't kneel to anybody, because GOD is within me | Ali Raymi | ||
| e8d3172 | Parke-Bernet Galleries. | E.L. Konigsburg | ||
| 5d44450 | The men left, turning" | E.L. Konigsburg | ||
| 9c75e4a | As sunshine broken in the rill,Though turned astray, is sunshine still. | Thomas Moore |