“Among us we represent islands of time as well as separate oceans of perspective. Or perhaps more aptly put, each of us may hold a piece to a puzzle no one else has been able to solve since humankind first landed on Hyperion.” (Location 341)
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 (Location 1469)
unfeeling laws and totally indifferent to the small, reasoning beings that inhabit it. (Location 1471)
do not wish to die, but I welcome pain and death rather than an eternity of mindless life. (Location 1475)
Throughout the history of military encounters, human combatants have been known to fight at their fiercest when challenged in enclosed places where flight is not an option. (Location 2778)
“There arises from a bad and unapt formation of words a wonderful obstruction to the mind.” (Location 2929)
MY EARLY POETRY was execrable. As with most bad poets, I was unaware of this fact, secure in my arrogance that the very act of creating gave some worth to the worthless abortions I was spawning. (Location 3036)
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. (Location 3047)
nearly infinite combinations of perception and memory combined with the sensitivity to what is perceived and remembered. (Location 3099)
reworked experience is the stuff of all true poetry and raw experience was the birthing gift of my new life. (Location 3101)
Besides, history viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians. (Location 3110)
Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion, (Location 3114)
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. (Location 3120)
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. (Location 3127)
Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.” (Location 3132)
“Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.” (Location 3145)
“Words are the only bullets in truth’s bandolier. And poets are the snipers.” (Location 3146)
Poetry is only secondarily about words. Primarily, it is about truth. (Location 3160)
“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.” (Location 3168)
the right word as opposed to accepting the almost right word was the difference between being struck by lightning and merely watching a lightning display. (Location 3169)
sometimes took an hour or a day for a word to come to me, for a concept to sink its roots into the firm soil of language. (Location 3330)
When one is writing—really writing—it is as if one is given a fatline to the gods. (Location 3407)
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. (Location 4739)
any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principle which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being was evil. (Location 4878)
When you’ve spent thirty years entering rooms filled with strangers you feel less pressure than when you’ve had only half that number of years of experience. (Location 7280)
as rewarding as speaking to a one-year-old human infant. Both sides usually enjoyed the exchange and there was a simulacrum of conversation, but neither party would come away the more knowledgeable. (Location 7416)
On Old Earth, it had long been accepted that if a species put mankind on its food-chain menu the species would be extinct before long. (Location 7824)
