Robert Charles Wilson Quotes

We're all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we're seldom formally introduced.

I would confront the thieves, I thought, and the self-evident justice of my case would cause them to crumble before me. I don't know why I expected such extravagant results from the application of mere justice. That kind of calculation is seldom borne out by worldly events.

Ah, books." Ziegler, smiling, came up behind me. "They bob like corks on an ocean. Float between worlds, messages in bottles.

What we cannot remember, we must rediscover.

There's no drug that'll make a stupid man smart.

And death? I don't fear death. I dread the absence of it.

I don't believe money is evil, but it can be terribly corrosive.

Personally, I don't believe in anything more supernatural than what you read about in the Bible, and I only believe that one day out of seven.

These movies belonged to the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that period of great, unsustainable, and hedonistic prosperity, driven by the burning of Earth's reserves of perishable oil, which culminated in the False Tribulation, and the wars, and the plagues, and the painful dwindling of inflated populations to more reasonable numbers.

An honest book is almost as good as a friend.

Ecstasy hates company.

We'll do what life always does defy expectations.

I suppose the pursuit of fashion has always carried a price, monetary or otherwise.

Goddamn you," Jacob said. "There's no damnation, Jacob. No Heaven but the forest and no God but the hive.

It was the kind of experience, Molly said, that would grow calluses on an angel's ass.

The suicidally disgruntled were legion, And their enemies included any and all Americans, Brits, Canadians, Danes, et cetera; or, conversely, all Moslems, dark-skinned people, non-English-speakers, immigrants; all Catholics, fundamentalists, atheists; all liberals, all conservatives...For such people the consummate act of moral clarity was a lynching or a suicide bombing, a fatwa or a pogrom. And they were ascendant now, rising like dark stars over a terminal landscape.

We live in an enlightened age, however, an age that has learned to see and to value other living things as they are, not as we wish them to be. And the long and creditable history of science has taught us, if nothing else, to look carefully before we judge to judge, if we must, based on what we see, not what we would prefer to believe.

I understand so very little. But I am not afraid to look: I am a good observer at last. My eyes are open, and I am not afraid.

There's no point living if you can't, at least occasionally, live.

You never stop being a parent, Adam, no matter how old or wise your child becomes you'll see.

I believed there were no Hypotheticals in the sense of consciously acting agents - conscious entities. There was only the process. The needles of evolution, endlessly knitting.

What had been released into the desert vacuum and starry oases of the galaxy was the inexorable logic of reproduction and natural selection. What followed was parasitism, predation, symbiosis, interdependency chaos, complexity, life.

It was amazing how these events lost their impact, translated through the flat gaze of a video screen.

Understanding is better than ignorance. Ignorance, unlike life, unlike narrative, is static. Understanding implies a forward motion, thus the possibility of change.

To capture the pawn, threaten the queen.

Children wear their natures like brightly-colored clothes; that's why they lie so transparently. Adulthood is the art of deceit.

It was possible at last to hear the silence to appreciate that there was a silence, deep and potent, out there beyond the pretension of the light.

When does loyalty become martyrdom?

I won't put my ignorance on an altar and call it God. It feels like idolatry, like the worst kind of idolatry.

[There was] only one news channel, overseen by a bland and complexly multicultural board of advisors. It broadcast in fifteen languages and was, as a rule, interesting in none of them.

Along with a dozen other students I had dissected a human cadaver and sorted its contents by size, color, function, and weight. There was nothing pleasant about the experience. Its only consolation was its truth and its only virtue was its utility.

The Mysteries are the Mysteries, and ultimately personal maybe the most personal thing in the universe. Evangelism, in my opinion, is a failure of the imagination. Beware of prophets: the best visions are the ones they leave in the desert.

Some things are taken away from you, some you leave behind and some you carry with you, world without end.

To fire a bullet into the heart or brains of one's fellow man even a fellow man striving to do the same to you creates what might be called an unassimilable memory: a memory that floats on daily life the way an oil stain floats on rainwater. Stir the rain barrel, scatter the oil into countless drops, disperse it all you like, but it will not mix; and eventually the slick comes back, as loathsomely intact as it ever was.

Do you want to tell the truth, or do you want to tell a story?

There are so many kinds of time. The time by which we measure our lives. Months and years. Or the big time, the time that raises mountains and makes stars. Or all the things that happen between one heartbeat and the next. Its hard to live in all those kinds of times. Easy to forget that you live in all of them.

Stupid people do stupid things, but people who are smart enough can do something really stupid.

If I am an agnostic, Calyxa, it's because I'm also a realist.

Evolution can't be predicted, Julian used to tell me; it's a scattershot business; it fires, but it doesn't aim.

From this new point of view, the universe I had inhabited became an object I could perceive in its entirety. It was a hypersphere embedded in a cloud of alternative states - the sum of all possible quantum trajectories from the big bang to the decay of matter. "Reality" - history as we had known or inferred it - was only the most likely of these possible trajectories. There were countless others, real in a different sense: a vast but finite set of paths not taken, a ghostly forest of quantum alternatives, the shores of an unknown sea.

Does it strike you, Mr. Keller, that we live every day in the science fiction of our youth?

One doesn't have to understand in order to look. One has to look, in order to understand.

Times like this, with the wind moving the grass and curling around her like a huge cool hand, Tess felt the world as a second presence, as another person, as if the wind and the grass had voices of their own and she could hear them talking.

For such people the consummate act of moral clarity was a lynching or a suicide bombing, a fatwa or a pogrom. And they were ascendant now, rising like dark stars over a terminal landscape .

The conversation was mesmerizing, not for its content but for the cadences of the talk, the rhythm we fell into when we were alone, now as before. Every conversation between friends or lovers creates its own easy or awkward rhythms, hidden talk that runs like a subterranean river under even the most banal exchange.

Some pious men may find this truth unorthodox and bitter: But Nature, Chance, and Time ensure survival of the fitter!

Average people seldom talked about anything interesting and often hurt each other savagely.

I suppose every decade gets the music it deserves.