Dan Simmons Quotes

The poets' scrolls will outlive the monuments of stone. Genius survives; all else is claimed by death.

Nobody can deny the immortality of genius, which ever remains as a bright and guiding star to the struggling humanities of succeeding ages.

But though empires, like all the other works of men, have all hitherto proved mortal, yet every empire aims at immortality.

I thought that we all were afraid of death, but I've talked to my wife and other people, and they're not afraid of death the way I am. I find that really confusing. I don't like the idea of nothingness - that's terrifying to me.

Like everyone else, I am going to die. But the words - the words live on for as long as there are readers to see them, audiences to hear them. It is immortality by proxy. It is not really a bad deal, all things considered.

We are made to be immortal, and yet we die. It's horrible, it can't be taken seriously

The deep waters of time will flow over us: only a few men of genius will lift a head above the surface, and though doomed eventually to pass into the same silence, will fight against oblivion and for a long time hold their own.

Art is the closest you can get to immortality, though it's a poor substitute - you're working for people not yet born - and people want it because it is brilliant. It ends up in museums anyway; the rich have to give it back to the people, it's their only option. There are no pockets in a shroud.

The noblest works and foundations have proceeded from childless men, which have sought to express the images of their minds where those of their bodies have failed.

Thread of their days without pity, and in the midst of life, without ever concerning themselves with this fatal moment, living as though they were to exist for ever, they disappear into the obscure cloud of immortality, uncertain of the fate which lies in store for them.

I'm going to live forever. Geniuses don't die.

Gods are what people worship. Men are what die.

The man, the writer, the instrument of the creation will die, but his creation does not die.

Creativity is a yearning for immortality

The fable runs that the gods mix our pains and pleasure in one cup, and thus mingle for us the adulterate immortality which we alone are permitted here to enjoy. Voluptuous raptures, could we prolong these at pleasure, would dissipate and dissolve us. A sip is the most that mortals are permitted from any goblet of delight.

Where are Shakespeare's imagination, Bacon's learning, Galileo's dream? Where is the sweet fancy of Sidney, the airy spirit of Fletcher, and Milton's thought severe? Methinks such things should not die and dissipate, when a hair can live for centuries, and a brick of Egypt will last three thousand years. I am content to believe that the mind of man survives, somehow or other, his clay.

Think not to match yourself against the gods, for men that walk the earth cannot hold their own with the immortals.

Remember, we are mortal, but poetry is not.

Poets never die, I thought. They just fail in the end.

In the ordinary, everyday understandings of the words involved, to say that someone survived death is to contradict yourself; while to assert that all of us live forever is to assert a manifest falsehood, the flat contrary of a universally known truth: namely, the truth that all human beings are mortal. For when, after some disaster, the 'dead' and the 'survivors' have both been listed, what logical space remains for a third category?

It is not the fear of death which creates the desire for immortality, but the desire for immortality which causes the fear of death.

Poets by Death are conquer'd but the wit Of poets triumphs over it.

As long as my ballets are danced, I will live.

Literature is the best way to overcome death.

I now believe when I'm dead and buried my tombstone will read, "I'm not entirely sure the band's over."