“Stand as I did after throwing the switch, a murderer, a betrayer, but still proud, feet firmly planted on Hyperion’s shifting sand, head held high, fist raised against the sky, crying “A plague on both your houses!”

“Eagles are extinct," grumbled Morpurgo. "Perhaps they should have attacked the sky. It betrayed them.”

“More climbers die during the descent than on the way up.”Karakaredes seems to be considering this. After a minute he says, “Yes, but here on the summit, there must be some ritual . . .”“Hero photos,” gasps Paul. “Gotta . . . have . . . hero photos.”Our alien nods. “Did . . . anyone . . . bring an imaging device? A camera? I did not.”

“I remembered Grandam telling me about an early Old Earth scientist, one Charles Darwin, who had come up with one of the early theories of evolution or gravitation or somesuch, and how—although raised a devout Christian even before the reward of the cruciform—he had become an atheist while studying a terrestrial wasp that paralyzed some large species of spider, planted its embryo, and let the spider recover and go about its business until it was time for the hatched wasp larvae to burrow its way out of the living spider’s abdomen.”

“If I should die," said I to myself, "I have left no immortal work behind me - nothing to make my friends proud of my memory - but I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember'd.”

“... you "met" this Moneta ... or whatever her real name is ... in her past but your future ... in a meeting that's still to come”

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