Robert Charles Wilson Quotes

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

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.

[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.

Nobody wants to conduct an autopsy on a dead saint.

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 .

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.

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

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.

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.

To capture the pawn, threaten the queen.

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

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

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

Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere.

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

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.

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

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.

An honest book is almost as good as a friend.

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

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

This would have been less annoying had it been untrue.

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

What we cannot remember, we must rediscover.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Ecstasy hates company.

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.

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.

I suppose every decade gets the music it deserves.

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'll do what life always does defy expectations.

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

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

John Scalzi is a fresh and appealing new voice, and Old Man's War is classic SF seen from a modern perspective—a fast-paced tour of a daunting, hostile universe.

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

It's partly the Southernization of America, in that the Southern working-class version of redneck is becoming the national version, and it's good-natured, it has humor and, in some ways, it's a performance.

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

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.

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.

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.