Robert Charles Wilson Quotes

Is there any evidence to the contrary? I don't need certainty in order to act on a well-founded suspicion.

I loved Molly. Or at least I told myself I did. Or, if what I felt for her was not love, it was at least a plausible imitation, a convincing substitute.

This would have been less annoying had it been untrue.

We spent a lot of time discussing cosmology first. I think that was your father's unique way of evaluating people. You can tell a lot about a person, he once said, by the way they look at the stars.

Promises were like bad checks, easy to write and hard to cash.

Consciousness," 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.

We're as ephemeral as raindrops. We all fall, and we all land somewhere.

The world is what it is and won't be bargained with.

The Dutch at close proximity looked much like Americans, apart from their peculiar uniforms, and so it was their uniforms I fired at, half convinced that I was killing, not human beings, but enemy costumes, which had borne their contents here from a distant land; and if some living man suffered for his enslavement to the uniform, or was penetrated by the bullets aimed at it well, that was unavoidable, and the fault couldn't be placed at my feet. The private charade was not equivalent to Courage, but it enabled a Callousness that served a similar purpose.

Nobody wants to conduct an autopsy on a dead saint.

Since Deacon Hollingshead's arrival in town last July the Dominion had been hard at work, cleansing New York City of moral corruption. "Corruption" is a popular word with the enthusiasts of the Dominion, usually uttered as a prelude to the knife, the docket, or the noose.

Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere.

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.

You must not make the mistake of thinking that because nothing lasts, nothing matters.