18 quotes
Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.”
Hyperion (1989)
There is something about raising a child that helps to sharpen one’s sense of what is real.
Hyperion (1989)
Sol found their tracts the usual combination of double talk and navel lint-gathering common to most religions.
Hyperion (1989)
In such seconds of decision entire futures are made.
Hyperion (1989)
Yes, our DNA is unique but so is a salamander’s.
Hyperion (1989)
Words are the only bullets in truth’s bandolier. And poets are the snipers.
Hyperion (1989)
It no longer matters who consider themselves the masters of events. Events no longer obey their masters.
Hyperion (1989)
“I ignore religions,” said Brawne Lamia. “I do not succumb to them.”
Hyperion (1989)
Listen! There will be no more offerings, neither child nor parent. There will be no more sacrifices for anyone other than our fellow human. The time of obedience and atonement is past.
Hyperion (1989)
It struck me that his dialect was actually the nondialect of someone who has learned a new language perfectly but without the lazy shortcuts of someone born to it.
Hyperion (1989)
In the beginning was the Word.
In the end...past honor, past life, past caring...
In the end will be the Word.
Hyperion (1989)
Sol realized what he had known and forgotten about very small communities: they were frequently annoying, always parochial, sometimes prying on a one-to-one level, but never had they subscribed to the vicious legacy of the so-called “public’s right to know.”
Hyperion (1989)
In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.
Hyperion (1989)
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.
Hyperion (1989)
Belief in one’s identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one’s immortality...and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.
Hyperion (1989)
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.
Hyperion (1989)
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.
Hyperion (1989)
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.
Hyperion (1989)