Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #1)

by Dan Simmons

I was being greeted by a silent, smiling band of bald, retarded children.

‘And if you did it again,’ he said, ‘we would have to kill you again.’

Metal teeth click shut in a steel vagina, missing his glans by a moist millimeter.

‘Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.’

I tried to explain this to my friends on Heaven’s Gate. ‘Piss, shit,’ I said. ‘Asshole motherfucker, goddamn shit goddamn. Cunt. Peepee cunt. Goddamn!’ They shook their heads and smiled, and walked away. Great poets are rarely understood in their own day.

It was her last and her first smile.