Robert Charles Wilson quotes - page 5

We contrast the urban and the natural, but that's a contemporary myth. We're animals, after all; our cities are organic products, fully as "natural” (whatever that word really means) as a termite hill or a rabbit warren. But how much more interesting: how much more complex, dressed in the intricacies and exfoliations of human culture, simple patterns iterated into infinite variation. And full of secrets, secrets beyond counting. (Robert Charles Wilson)
Here was the real horror, Degrandpre thought, this breaking of barriers. Civilization, after all, was the making of divisions, of walls and fences to parse the chaotic wild into ordered cells of human imagination. Wilderness invades the garden and reason is overthrown. View quote
Robert Charles Wilson
He's exactly what she wants. He's the last thing she needs. View quote
Robert Charles Wilson
Fortune had done him few favors in the past, and he wasn't sure he trusted it. View quote
Robert Charles Wilson
Time is a vastness,” he said finally. "We tend to underestimate it. View quote
Robert Charles Wilson
A lot of people have made political careers out of religious piety and the fear of foreigners, but that won't last. Not enough foreigners or miracles to sustain the crisis. View quote
Robert Charles Wilson
The attacking piece displaces its victim. The vanquished piece leaves the plane of the board entirely. But it does not, in a higher sense, cease to exist. View quote
Robert Charles Wilson
Maybe you were better off not knowing.” "Ignorance is not bliss. View quote
Robert Charles Wilson
For them, the idea of forgetting was indistinguishable from the idea of death. To pass out of memory was to pass out of the world. To conserve memory was to confer immortality. View quote
Robert Charles Wilson
Last week the doctor at the Tilson Rural Clinic had shown him his X-rays, the too-easy-to-interpret shadows on his liver and lungs. Guilford had declined an offer of surgery and and last-gasp radiation therapy. This horse was too old to beat. View quote
Robert Charles Wilson
Julian read the Bible as if it were a work of contemporary fiction, open to criticism or even revision. Once, when I queried him about the purpose of his unusual reinterpretations, he said to me, "I want a better Bible, Adam. I want a Bible in which the Fruit of Knowledge contains the Seeds of Wisdom, and makes life more pleasurable for mankind, not worse. I want a Bible in which Isaac leaps up from the sacrificial stone and chokes the life out of Abraham, to punish him for the abject and bloody sin of Obedience. I want a Bible in which Lazarus is dead and stubborn about it, rather than standing to attention at the beck and call of every passing Messiah.”. (Robert Charles Wilson)
I want them not to forget. Which is, I suppose, what all aged veterans want. But they'll forget. Of course they will. And their children will know less of us than they do, and their children's children will find us barely imaginable. Which is as it should be. You can't stop time. View quote
Robert Charles Wilson
We might have destroyed ourselves, but at least it would have been our own fault.” "Would it, though? Whose fault exactly? Yours? Mine? No, it would have been the result of several billion human beings making relatively innocuous choices: to have kids, drive a car to work, keep their job, solve the short-term problems first. When you reach the point at which even the most trivial acts are punishable by the death of the species, then obviously, obviously, you're at a critical juncture, a different kind of point of no return. View quote
Robert Charles Wilson
Now as ever, he was startled by the wild exuberance of the twentieth century. All these lights! Colored neon and glaring filaments, powered, he had learned, but mechanical dams spanning rivers hundreds of miles away. And most of this-astonishingly-in the name of advertising. View quote
Robert Charles Wilson
To whom had he retailed his conscience, Sandra wondered, and what was the going price these days? View quote
Robert Charles Wilson
He hated the idea of eulogizing himself. Some tasks are best left to others, surely including obituaries. View quote
Robert Charles Wilson
Try to imagine that Minkowski cube, Ray said, as a block of liquid water freezing (as contrary as this seems) from the bottom up. The progression of the freeze represents at least our human experience of the march of time. What is frozen is past, immutable, changeless. What is liquid is future, indeterminate, uncertain. We live on the crystallizing boundary. View quote
Robert Charles Wilson
Later Julian would give me another book he had culled from among the Archival duplicates, a short novel called The Time Machine by Mr. H. G. Wells, about a marvelous but apparently imaginary cart which carried a man into the future-and it fascinated me-but the Archive itself was a Time Machine in everything but name. Here were voices preserved on browning paper like pressed flowers, whispering apostasies into the ear of a new century. View quote
Robert Charles Wilson
Kait was immediately bored. Children Kaitlin's age possess no context; one video event is much like another. View quote
Robert Charles Wilson
Sometimes he wears the crown,” Magnus Stepney once remarked, "and sometimes, by the grace of God, he takes the damned thing off. View quote
Robert Charles Wilson
But really, who do you think we're working for? Not some Sunday school god, not the proverbial loving shepherd. The shoving leopard, more like. (Robert Charles Wilson)
The rooms were confining, the windows minuscule, the ceilings perilously low. She could not have spent much money on the furnishings, which were shabby, threadbare, nicked, and splintered-I had seen better furniture abandoned at Montreal curbsides. But if her book-cases were humble, they were bowed under the weight of surprisingly many books-almost as many as there had been in the library of the Duncan and Crowley Estate back in Williams Ford. It seemed to me a treasure more estimable than any fine sofa or plush footstool, and worth all the rough economies surrounding it. View quote
Robert Charles Wilson
Don't despise life. View quote
Robert Charles Wilson
A broken human being isn't even a good tool. View quote
Robert Charles Wilson
The only reason you can't see how crazy this is is because we've been neck-deep in crazy for years. View quote
Robert Charles Wilson