Dan Simmons

The future is never written...only penciled in.

If the universe has any soul, it is the soul of irony.

If there is a true secret to the universe, it is this...these first few seconds of warmth and entry and complete acceptance by one’s beloved.

I realized that night the import and the terrible difficulty in the task ahead of me—in keeping this child safe from the sharp edges of a strange and indifferent universe.

I think that is was on this alien and storm-tossed night that I first understood what it might be like to be a parent.

I was not surprised to wake up alive. I suppose one is surprised only when one awakens dead.

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

I realized then what I had known since I was a child watching my mother die of cancer—namely, that beyond ideology and ambition, beyond thought and emotion, there was only pain. And salvation from it.”

I realized that for this moment, nothing in the past mattered. Nothing terrible in the future mattered. What mattered was her skin against me, her hand holding me, the perfume of her hair and skin and the warmth of her breath against my chest. This was satori. This was truth.

The lieutenant took his time scanning their visa chips, letting them wait in the drizzle, occasionally making a comment with the idle arrogance common to such nobodies who have just come into a small bit of power.

Sol remembered the dream, remembered his daughter’s hug, and realized that in the end—when all else is dust—loyalty to those we love is all we can carry with us to the grave.

In such seconds of decision entire futures are made.

It was a dramatization of total chaos, a functional definition of confusion, an unchoreographed dance of sad violence. It was war.