I wish we had the technology to fight God on an equal basis. To beard him in his den. To fight back for all the injustices heaped on humanity. To allow him to alter his smug arrogance or be blown to hell.

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

Look,’ said Arena. ‘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.

— Dan Simmons

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

— Dan Simmons

Luckily, even as a young man not yet become himself, John Bridges had two things besides indecision that kept him from self-destruction - books and a sense of irony.

— Dan Simmons

My intellect was my greatest vanity.

— Dan Simmons

No lifetime is long enough for those who wish to create, Raul. Or for those who simply wish to understand themselves and their lives. It is, perhaps, the curse of being human, but also a blessing.

— Dan Simmons

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.

— Dan Simmons

... pain has been with him since birth - the universe's gift to a poet ...

— Dan Simmons

... primitive times had required primitive obedience, that later generations evolved to the point where parents offered themselves as sacrifice - as in the dark knights of the ovens which pocked old earth history - and that current generations had to deny any command for sacrifice. Sol had written that whatever God now took in human consciousness - whether as a mere manifestation of the subconscious in all its revanchist needs or as a more conscious attempt at philosophical and ethical evolution - humankind could no longer agree to offer up sacrifice in God's name. Sacrifice and the agreement to sacrifice had written human history in blood.

— Dan Simmons