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.
Robert Charles WilsonConsciousness," according to current scientific thought, was something the higher mammals had evolved in order to help them reproduce, much the way a garden slug secretes slime. It had no special ontological status. The "self" was a genetically modulated and biologically useful illusion.
Robert Charles WilsonThe 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.
Robert Charles WilsonChildren wear their natures like brightly-colored clothes; that's why they lie so transparently. Adulthood is the art of deceit.
Robert Charles WilsonThese 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.
Robert Charles Wilson