Dan Simmons
Any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principal which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being evil.Collection: Evil
Its hard to die. Harder to liveCollection: Harder
This is every writer's nightmare - the sudden breakdown of meaning in the language that sustains and supports us.Collection: Support
Most of us do know we have no immortality. And when you've found a genius, someone who has already purchased his immortality in musical or literary terms, it's maddening.Collection: Musical
The past is dead and buried. But I know now that buried things have a way of rising to the surface when one least expects them to.Collection: Past
Wilkie Collins was a rival and competitor of Dickens. His novel Moonstone sold more copies at the time than Dickens' last two books. But that meant nothing in the long run. Right now, to be honest, Wilkie Collins is what he deserved to be back then: a footnote, an almost lost memory. And he knew he would become that.Collection: Running
I think all the simple things can and do still work - holding your child's hand while walking across the street will do it. But we can hardly hear it for all the noise which has turned love into a cliche, and most people can't even hear John Lennon's "All You Need Is Love" anymore without wincing.Collection: Simple
Artists recognize other artists as soon as the pencil begins to move.Collection: Art
As for the depiction of the Catholic church, it's not meant to be a predictionCollection: Catholic
Fate and victory shift ... now this way, now that way -- like a line of unarmored men under a hail of enemy arrows.Collection: Fate
Doing a life study while drunk and in the process of being seduced is never a formula for quality art.Collection: Art
It started 25 years ago, when I was teaching elementary school in a small town in MissouriCollection: Teaching
All of our lives are governed by a certain degree of faith in bullshit.Collection: Faith
We are not the only avatars of humanity. Once our computing machines achieved self-consciousness, they became part of this design.Collection: Self
There is a certain solipsism to serious illness which claims all of one's attention as certainly as an astronomical black hole seizes anything unlucky enough to fall within its critical radius.Collection: Fall
Mobs have passions, not brains.Collection: Passion
Laws had a bad habit of being ignored or abrogated when societal push came to totalitarian shove.Collection: Law
Merely to live without a pain Is little gladness, little gain, Ah, welcome joy tho' mixt with grief-- The thorn-set flower that crowns the leaf.Collection: Pain
Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversionCollection: Doe
The problem with being passionately in love ... is that it deprives you of too much sleep.Collection: Love
Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Pain
Life is brutal that way ... the loss of irrecoverable moments amid trivia and distraction.Collection: Life
No lifetime is long enough for those ... who simply wish to understand themselves and their lives. It is, perhaps, the curse of being human, but also a blessing.Collection: Life
God is found in this Life ... to wait for another is folly.Collection: Life
Every age fraught with discord and danger seems to spawn a leader meant only for that age, a political giant whose absence, in retrospect, seems inconceivable when the history of that age is written.Collection: Leadership
Those who ignore history's lessons in the ultimate folly of war are forced to do more than relive them ... they may be forced to die by them.Collection: War
Anticlimax is, of course, the warp and way of things. Real life seldom structures a decent denouement.Collection: Life
Power: a currency that never went out of style.Collection: Power
How could anyone stay sane with entire lifetimes stored in one human mind?Collection: Memories
The young remember most deeply.... When we are old and failing, it is the memories of childhood which can be summoned most clearly.Collection: Memories
It no longer matters who consider themselves the masters of events. Events no longer obey their masters.Collection: Events
Writing, Im convinced, should be a subversive activity - frowned on by the authorities - and not one cooed over and praised beyond common sense by some teacher.Collection: Teacher
I loved almost everything about being a teacher, but I was an unusual teacherCollection: Teacher
Nobody gets beyond a petroleum economy. Not while there's petroleum there.Collection: Economy
As long as my sixth graders showed an average improvement of five years, the principal and district pretty much left me alone to create my own curriculum and teach whatever I wantedCollection: Average
She had always felt that the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unself-conscious flow of little things - the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossings and connections casual, dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal.Collection: Time
Mystery. The strangeness of place so necessary to some creative spirits. A perfect mixture of the classical utopia and the pagan mystery.Collection: Perfect
Gass once wrote: "Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it." Here is the essence of mankind's creative genius: not the edifices of civilization nor the bang-flash weapons which can end it, but the words which fertilize new concepts like spermatozoa attacking an ovum. It might be argued that the Siamese twin infants of word/idea are the only contribution the human species can, will, or should make to the raveling cosmos.Collection: Essence
What, after all, is more real to us than the geography of our childhoods?Collection: Real
Poetry is only secondarily about words. Primarily, it is about truth. I dealt with the Ding an Sich, the substance behind the shadow, weaving powerful concepts, similes, and connections the way an engineer would raise a skyscraper with the whiskered-alloy skeleton being constructed long before the glass and plastic and chromaluminum appears.Collection: Truth
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 electric lighting protected the great cities of the world from total barbarism.Collection: Wall
A hero. You want to be one of those rare human beings who make history, rather than merely watch it flow around them like water around a rock.Collection: Hero
History viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.Collection: Dark
I loved you backward and forward in time. I loved you beyond boundaries of time and space.Collection: Space
The pack of media brayed and bellowed outside the house for seven weeks. Sol realized then what he had known and forgotten about very small communities: they were frequently annoying, always parochial, sometimes prying on a one-to-one level, but never had they subscribed to the vicious legacy of the so-called "public's right to know".Collection: Media
It is a mystery, and to tell the truth, I am intrigued by mysteries even if this is to be my last week of enjoying them. I would welcome some glimmer of understanding but, failing that, working on the puzzle will suffice.Collection: Understanding
I know what cancer was. How is it like humankind?" Sek Hardeen's perfectly modulated, softly accented tones showed a hint of agitation. "We have spread out through the galaxy like cancer cells through a living body, Duré. We multiply without thought to the countless life forms that must die or be pushed aside so that we may breed and flourish. We eradicate competing forms of intelligent life.Collection: Cancer
Once evolution gets a good basic design, it tends to throw away the variants and concentrate on the near-infinite diversity within that design.Collection: Diversity