Robin Sloan Quotes

If this sounds impressive to you, you’re over thirty.

Why does the typical adventuring group consist of a wizard, a warrior, and a rogue, anyway? It should really be a wizard, a warrior, and a rich guy. Otherwise who's going to pay for all the swords and spells and hotel rooms?

I feel a little whirl of dislocation -- the trademark sensation of the world being more closely knit together than you expected

Then: I google "time-series visualization" and start work on a new version of my model, thinking that maybe I can impress her with a prototype. I am really into the kind of girl you can impress with a prototype.

A clerk and a ladder and warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time.

Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines -- it's hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.

So I switch to my MacBook and make my rounds: news sites, blogs, tweets. I scroll back to find the conversations that happened without me during the day. When every single piece of media you consume is time-shifted, does that mean it’s actually you that’s time-shifted?

I've never listened to an audiobook before, and I have to say it's a totally different experience. When you read a book, the story definitely takes place in your head. When you listen, it seems to happen in a little cloud all around it, like a fuzzy knit cap pulled down over your eyes

Some of them are working very hard indeed. “What are they doing?” “My boy!” he said, eyebrows raised. As if nothing could be more obvious. “They are reading!

Kat bought a New York Times but couldn’t figure out how to operate it, so now she’s fiddling with her phone.

This girl has the spark of life. This is my primary filter for new friends (girl- and otherwise) and the highest compliment I can pay. I've tried many times to figure out exactly what ignites it -- what cocktail of characteristics come together in the cold, dark cosmos to form a star. I know it's mostly in the face -- not just the eyes, but the brow, the cheeks, the mouth, and the micromuscles that connect them all. Kat's micromuscles are very attractive.

Our books still do not require batteries. But I am no fool. It is a slender advantage.

(about Kindles) I have one and I use it most nights. I always imagine the books staring and whispering, Traitor!

The thinnest tendrils of dawn are creeping in from the east. People in New York are softly starting to tweet.

...I can’t stop squirming. If fidgets were Wikipedia edits, I would have completely revamped the entry on guilt by now, and translated it into five new languages.

There is no immortality that is not built on friendship and work done with care. All the secrets in the world worth knowing are hiding in plain sight.

Your life must be an open city, with all sorts of ways to wander in.

Her home is the burrow of a bibliophile hobbit -- low-ceilinged, close-walled, and brimming over with books.

It turns out Dungeons & Dragons is much better on paper than it is in reality.

When every single piece of media you consume is time-shifted, does that mean it's actually you that's time-shifted?

He asked <...> Rosemary, why do you love books so much? And I said, Well, I don't know <...> I suppose I love them because they're quiet, and I can take them to the park.

I'd sit at my kitchen table and start scanning help-wanted ads on my laptop, but then a browser tab would blink and I'd get distracted and follow a link to a long magazine article about genetically modified wine grapes. Too long, actually, so I'd add it to my reading list. Then I'd follow another link to a book review. I'd add the review to my reading list, too, then download the first chapter of the book—third in a series about vampire police. Then, help-wanted ads forgotten, I'd retreat to the living room, put my laptop on my belly, and read all day. I had a lot of free time.

So I guess you could say Neel owes me a few favors, except that so many favors have passed between us now that they are no longer distinguishable as individual acts, just a bright haze of loyalty. OUr friendship is a nebula. (34)

But I kept at it with the help-wanted ads. My standards were sliding swiftly. At first I had insisted I would only work at a company with a mission I believed in. Then I thought maybe it would be fine as long as I was learning something new. After that I decided it just couldn't be evil. Now I was carefully delineating my personal definition of evil.

There is no immortality that is not built on friendship and work done with care. All the secrets in the world worth knowing are hiding in plain sight. It takes forty-one seconds to climb a ladder three stories tall. It's not easy to imagine the year 3012, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. We have new capabilities now—strange powers we're still getting used to. The mountains are a message from Aldrag the Wyrm-Father. Your life must be an open city, with all sorts of ways to wander in.

Let me give you some advice: make friends with a millionaire when he's a friendless sixth-grader.

I walk alone in the darkness and wonder how a person would begin to determine the circumference of the earth. I have no idea. I’d probably just google it.

Are there sexual fetishes that involve books? There must be. I try not to imagine how they might work.

Neel takes a sharp breath and I know exactly what it means. It means: I have waited my whole life to walk through a secret passage built into a bookshelf.

He has the strangest expression on his face- the emotional equivalent of 404 PAGE NOT FOUND.

You know, I'm really starting to think the whole world is just a patchwork quilt of crazy little cults, all with their own secret spaces, their own records, their own rules.

Imagination runs out. But it makes sense, right? We probably just imagine things based on what we already know, and we run out of analogies in the thirty-first century.

After that, the book will fade, the way all books fade in your mind. But I hope you will remember this: A man walking fast down a dark lonely street. Quick steps and hard breathing, all wonder and need. A bell above a door and the tinkle it makes. A clerk and a ladder and warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time.

I loved The Chronicles of Narnia. I loved The Chronicles of Prydain. Basically, 'Chronicles of' - I was in!

All the secrets of the world worth knowing are hiding in plain site.

I sit up straight and do the first thing a person is supposed to do in an emergency, which is send a text message.

America pays defense contractors to build aircraft carriers. Google pays brilliant programmers to do whatever the hell they want.

... nothing lasts long. We all come to life and gather allies and build empires and die, all in a single moment - maybe a single pulse of some giant processor somewhere.