Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos Book 1)

I saw no reason to acknowledge an acknowledgment of the obvious.

an epic tour de force in an age of mediocre farce.

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.

Most of us, I hope, have had some child or spouse or friend like Beatrice, someone who by his very nature, his seemingly innate goodness and intelligence, makes us uncomfortably conscious of our lies when we lie.

She [Beatrice] alone was still real for him, still implied meaning in the world, and beauty. Her nature became his landmark – what Melville would call, with more sobriety than we can now muster, his Greenwich Standard

On Old Earth they had a word for what I was – quisling.

occasionally making a comment with the idle arrogance common to such nobodies who have just come into a small bit of power.

life of a poet lies not merely in the finite language-dance of expression but in the nearly infinite combinations of perception and memory combined with the sensitivity to what is perceived and remembered.

Thus, on Heaven’s Gate, as I dredged bottom scum from the slop canals under the red gaze of Vega Primo or crawled on hands and knees through stalactites and stalagmites of rebreather bacteria in the station’s labyrinthine lungpipes, I became a poet. All I lacked were the words.