Eagles are extinct," grumbled Marburg. "Perhaps they should have attacked the sky. It betrayed them.

— Dan Simmons

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.

— Dan Simmons

Evolution is not progress, that there is no ‘goal’ or direction to evolution. Evolution is change. Evolution ‘succeeds’ if that change best adapts some leaf or branch of its tree of life to conditions of the universe.

— Dan Simmons

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 sophisticated 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

— Dan Simmons

He loved the darkness and the mystery of the Catholic service--the tall priest strutting like a carrion crow and pronouncing magic in a dead language, the immediate magic of the Eucharist bringing the dead back to life so that the faithful could devour Him and become of Him, the smell of incense and the mystical chanting.

— Dan Simmons

His imagination was always more real than the reality of daily life.

— Dan Simmons

I could not do this, I realized, if I were immortal. This degree of love of life and of one another is granted, I saw for once and forever, not to immortals, but to those who live briefly and always under the shadow of death and loss.

— Dan Simmons

I desperately want to talk to her now. I want to ask her who it was who so deftly crafted and shaped the legend that was our love.

— Dan Simmons

I explained my opinion of the ship’s logic. “That is a strange designation,” said the ship. “While I have certain organic elements incorporated into my substructure and decentralized DNA computing components, I am not—in the strictest sense of the term—a biological organism. I have no digestive system. No need for elimination, other than the occasional waste gas and passenger effluvium. Therefore, I have no anus in either real or figurative terms. Therefore, I hardly believe I could qualify to be called an …” “Shut up,” I said.

— Dan Simmons

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 love'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember'd.

— Dan Simmons