Dan Simmons

“Entropy is a bitch,” I said.

“Now, now,” said Aenea from where she was leaning on the terrace wall. “Entropy can be our friend.”

“When?” I said.

She turned around so that she was leaning back on her elbows. The building behind her was a dark rectangle, serving to highlight the glow of her sunburned skin. “It wears down empires,” she said. “And does in despotisms.”

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.

Crudely effective, but wildly inefficient.

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

One of the men in the boat—I could not remember which character—had moved through all of the circles of theological supposition: praying, believing that God was a merciful Deity who sat up nights worrying about him, then believing that God was a cruel bastard, and finally deciding that no one was listening.

“What?”

“Never mind. It will make sense when it comes about. All improbabilities do when probability waves collapse into event.”

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

De Soya blinks. “Suicide is a mortal sin,” he says.

On the screen the girl nods seriously. “Yes,” she says, “but I am not a Christian. Also, I'd rather go to hell than go with you.”

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.”