Dan Simmons Quotes
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Losing our ignorance can be dangerous because our ignorance is a shield.
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Artists recognize other artists as soon as the pencil begins to move.
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What, after all, is more real to us than the geography of our childhoods?
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Context is to data what water is to a dolphin
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We are not the only avatars of humanity. Once our computing machines achieved self-consciousness, they became part of this design.
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Any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principal which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being evil.
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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.
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Once evolution gets a good basic design, it tends to throw away the variants and concentrate on the near-infinite diversity within that design.
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Love is nothing but lust misspelled.
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Doing a life study while drunk and in the process of being seduced is never a formula for quality art.
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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.
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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.
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Nobody gets beyond a petroleum economy. Not while there's petroleum there.
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Life doesn't retreat.
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The whole planet reeks of mysticism without revelation.
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The problem with being passionately in love ... is that it deprives you of too much sleep.
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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.
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Once upon a time ... the only autonomous intelligences we humans knew of were us humans. We thought then that if humankind ever devised another intelligence that it would be the result of a huge project ... a great mass of silicon and ancient transistors and chips and circuit boards ... a machine with lots of networking circuits, in other words, aping-if you will pardon the expression-the human brain in form and function. Of course, AIs did not evolve that way. They sort of slipped into existence when we humans were looking the other way.
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You have to live to really know things, my love
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I'm very interested in the evolution of technology, and it's really the idea of artificial life which intrigues me, more than just intelligence - a new, evolving life form arising within our datasphere and coming into living relation with humanity.
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Religion seems to have always offered us that false duality ... the silences of infinite space or the cozy comfort of inner certainty.
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When I get about five readers I can rub together in one genre, I leave that genre and go somewhere else. And this is due to a vow that I made myself when I started writing - that if I had any success at all, I would not be bound to one form of writing. That I would write what moves me. The only way I can see me surviving and doing more than one book is to present the readers with a Dan Simmons novel, with whatever tropes and protocols from whatever genre I want to borrow them. If that builds a Dan Simmons readership, well then, okay. Otherwise, forget about it. I'd rather drive a truck.
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Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion
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God is found in this Life ... to wait for another is folly.
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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.
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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.
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History viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.
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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
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There is no doubt that I have discovered the ultimate in stagnant human societies. The Bikura have realized the human dream of immortality and have paid for it with their humanity and their immortal souls.
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Seduction... was both a science and art - a blend of skill, discipline, proximity, and opportunity. Mostly proximity.
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