Dan Simmons

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.

There is something about raising a child that helps to sharpen one’s sense of what is real.

“Sometimes,” said General Morpurgo, taking her hand, “dreams are all that separate us from the machines.”

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.

He knew what had to be done. It is not always the same as knowing what to do.

Another friend, a child psychologist from the college, once commented that Rachel at age five showed the most reliable indicators of true giftedness in a young person: structured curiosity, empathy for others, compassion, and a fierce sense of fair play.

Those who ignore history’s lessons in the ultimate folly of war are forced to do more than relive them...they may be forced to die by them.

I now understand the need for faith—pure, blind, fly-in-the-face-of-reason faith—as a small life preserver in the wild and endless sea of a universe ruled by unfeeling laws and totally indifferent to the small, reasoning beings that inhabit it.

Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.”

We are created for precisely this sort of suffering. In the end, it is all we are, those limpid tide pools of self-consciousness between crashing waves of pain.

Sarai had treasured every stage of Rachel’s childhood, enjoying the day-to-day normalcy of things; a normalcy which she quietly accepted as the best of life. She had always felt that the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and the triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unself-conscious flow of little things—the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossing and connections casual, dialogues imminently (sic) forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal.

Words are the only bullets in truth’s bandolier. And poets are the snipers.