Hyperion Quotes

“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.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“It occurs to me that our survival may depend upon our talking to one another.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“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, Hyperion

“To be a true poet is to become God.
I tried to explain this to my friends on Heaven's Gate. 'Piss, shit,' I said. 'Asshole motherfucker, goddamn shit goddamn. Cunt. Pee-pee cunt. Goddamn!'
They shook their heads and smiled, and walked away. Great poets are rarely understood in their own day.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“After fifty-five years of dedicating his life and work to the story of ethical systems, Sol Weintraub had come to a single, unshakable conclusion: any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principal which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being was evil.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

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

“There is a fullness and calmness there which can come only from knowing pain.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“In such seconds of decision entire futures are made.”
― Dan Simmons, 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, Hyperion

“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 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 crossings and connections casual, dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

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

“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, Hyperion

“It no longer matters who consider themselves the masters of events. Events no longer obey their masters.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“You have to live to really know things, my love”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“Barbarians, we call them, while all the while we timidly cling to our Web like Visigoths crouching in the ruins of Rome's faded glory and proclaim ourselves civilized.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“A philosopher/mathematician named Bertrand Russell who lived and died in the same century as Gass once wrote: “Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.” Here is the essence of mankind’s creative genius: not the edifices of civilization nor the bang-flash weapons which can end it, but the words which fertilize new concepts like spermatazoa attacking an ovum.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“Who was Hitler?' I said.
Tyrena smiled slightly. 'An Old Earth politician who did some writing.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“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, Hyperion

“Mark Twain once opined in his homey way: “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“The day is perfect and I hate it for being so.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“Nobody gets beyond a petroleum economy. Not while there's petroleum there.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“[H]istory viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“The whole planet reeks of mysticism without revelation.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“Sol wanted to know how any ethical system – much less a religion so indomitable that it had survived every evil mankind could throw at it – could flow from a command from God for a man to slaughter his son. It did not matter to Sol that the command had been rescinded at the last moment. It did not matter that the command was a test of obedience. In fact, the idea that it was the obedience of Abraham which allowed him to become the father of all the tribes of Israel was precisely what drove Sol into fits of fury.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“Do you think it's ready?" I [Silenus, The Poet] asked.
"It's perfect... a masterpiece."
"Do you think it'll sell?" I asked.
"No fucking way.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“Sol had not known he was lonely until he met Sarai.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“The Chinese poet George Wu ... recorded on his comlog: "Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become." Later, on his last disk to his lover the week before he died, Wu said: "Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“I will not try to describe the beauty of life in a Swarm ‒ their zero-gravity globe cities and comet farms and thrust clusters, their micro-orbital forests and migrating rivers and the ten thousand colors and textures of life at Rendezvous Week. Suffice it to say that I believe the Ousters have done what Web humanity has not in the past millennia: evolved.
While we live in our derivative cultures, pale reflections of Old Earth life, the Ousters have explored new dimensions of aesthetics and ethics and biosciences and art and all the things that must change and grow to reflect the human soul.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“I discovered what a mental stimulant physical labor could be; not mere physical labor, I should add, but absolutely spine-bending, lung-racking, gut-ripping, ligament-tearing, and ball-breaking physical labor. But as long as the task is both onerous and repetitive, I discovered, the mind is not only free to wander to more imaginative climes, it actually flees to higher planes.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion