The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Dan Simmons

Writing, I’m convinced, should be a subversive activity – frowned on by the authorities – and not one cooed over and praised beyond common sense by some teacher.

Writing, Common Sense

I loved almost everything about being a teacher, but I was an unusual teacher.

Loved, Everything, Being

My intellect was my greatest vanity.

intellect, intellectualism, intellectuals, vanity

The Great Change is when humankind accepts its role as part of the natural order of the universe instead of its role as a cancer

cancer, humankind, natural-order

The Hegemony had known how to treat cancer, but most of the gene-tailoring knowledge and technology had been lost after the Fall.

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 come to understand it, needed no Creator; in fact, allowed no Creator. Its rules allowed very little tinkering and no major revisions. It had not begun and would not end, beyond cycles of expansion and contraction as regular and self-regulated as the seasons on Old Earth

god, metaphysics, science

… pain has been with him since birth – the universe’s gift to a poet …

gift, pain, universe

Love was as hardwired into the structure of the universe as gravity and matter.

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.

literary, silence, sonnets

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.

food, health, human-beings, logic, meat

Life is brutal that way… the loss of irrecoverable moments amid trivia and distraction.

cantos-3, dan-simmons, endymion, hyperion, inspirational, sad, sad-but-true

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.