Dan Simmons Quotes

Form must have a content, and that content must be linked with nature.

The great poems are not about experience, but are the experience itself, felt in the body.

A good poem brims with reflected beauty and even a bracing, beautiful ugliness. At the center of our lives, in the midst of the busyness and the forgetting, is a story that makes sense when everything extraneous has been taken away.

I think that's what poets try to do: They try to sidestep neurology and go straight to meaning.

Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.

The poets are almost always wrong about the facts... That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth...

Poetry is not truth, it is the resurrection of presences.

The basic truth of all things, as nearly as we may ever dream of determining and knowing this truth, is form, that which is, as it is. The way and shape of the thing no less than the thing itself.

A powerful enough metaphor grows its own truth.

What is real is always worth it.

In a lot of ways, the task at hand for any poem is to approach something that defies exactness or definition with a kind of exactness or precision.

To be rather than to seem.

The truth has no form, you know. It's not like walking around trying to actually ask for favors and to be acknowledged, it is what it is.

Give me truths for I am weary of the surfaces.

In nature alone are forms. That which is not of nature cannot have any forms, fine or gross. It must be formless.

What is real is not the external form, but the essence of things.

A thing is a thing, not what is said of a thing

A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds.

Truth cannot be structured or confined.

I have made a long enough descent into the void to speak with certainty. There is nothing but beauty--and beauty has only one perfect expression, Poetry. All the rest is a lie.

Truth is the foundation and the reason of the perfection of beauty, for of whatever stature a thing may be, it cannot be beautiful-and perfect, unless it be truly what it should be, and possess truly all that it should have.

That is what poetry can do. It speaks to us of what does not exist, which is not only better than what exists, but even more like the truth.

Everything is substance plus name and form. Name and form come and go, but substance remains ever the same.