Eliezer Silva

“Sol! Take your daughter, your only daughter Rachel, Whom you love, and go to the world called Hyperion and offer her there as a burnt offering at one of the places of which I shall tell you.” Sol hesitated and looked back to Rachel. The baby’s eyes were deep and luminous as she looked up at her father. Sol felt the unspoken yes. Holding her tightly, he stepped forward into the darkness and raised his voice against the silence: “Listen! There will be no more offerings, neither child nor parent. There will be no more sacrifices for anyone other than our fellow human. The time of obedience and atonement is past.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“The idea of choice has deeply penetrated our perception of feelings, as though we can ‘choose’ whether or not to have them.”
― Renata Salecl, The Tyranny of Choice

“The ego (one’s self-perception) is a very shaky structure, easily undermined by unconscious drives and desires. It is possible to repress those drives for a while and feel like a capable, rational subject, but eventually they will reveal themselves in the form of idiosyncratic behaviour, slips of the tongue, even illnesses. The perception that one can craft an identity by copying that of someone else has created particular problems in today’s society.”
― Renata Salecl, The Tyranny of Choice

“Religion seems to have always offered us that false duality,” she said, setting her cup of tea on a flat stone. “The silences of infinite space or the cozy comfort of inner certainty.”
― Dan Simmons, The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle: Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, The Rise of Endymion