Quotes from book
Hyperion

Hyperion
Dan Simmons

Hyperion is a Hugo Award-winning 1989 science fiction novel by American writer Dan Simmons. It is the first book of his Hyperion Cantos. The plot of the novel features multiple time-lines and characters. It follows a similar structure to The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. The next book in the series was The Fall of Hyperion, published in 1990.

“Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion

“In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion

“In such seconds of decision entire futures are made.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 6 (p. 431)

“Evolution brings human beings. Human beings, through a long and painful process, bring humanity.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Endymion (1996), Chapter 44 (p. 449)
Source: Hyperion
Context: “Humanity has evolved—as far as it has evolved,” continued the old priest, “with no thanks to its predecessors or itself. Evolution brings human beings. Human beings, through a long and painful process, bring humanity.”
“Empathy,” Aenea said softly.

“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.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 3 (p. 186)

“You have to live to really know things, my love”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion

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

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 3 (p. 192)

“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.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 2 (p. 105)

“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.””

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 4 (p. 287)

“In the beginning was the Word.
In the end…past honor, past life, past caring…
In the end will be the Word.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 3 (p. 233)

“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.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 1 (p. 90)

“It no longer matters who consider themselves the masters of events. Events no longer obey their masters.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 6 (p. 472)

“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.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 3 (p. 191)

“Sol found their tracts the usual combination of double talk and navel lint-gathering common to most religions.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 4 (p. 269)

“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.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 4 (p. 284)

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

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 6 (p. 433)

“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.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 4 (p. 249)

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

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 3 (p. 192)

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