C. Robert Cargill Quotes

We have become the very worst parts of our makers, without the little things, the good things, the magic things, that made them them.

I lived so long for nothing, but I get to die for something. And that's really living. Because that's who I really was after all. That's all that matters.

And as the sun sank behind the curve of the earth, I crossed my fingers, praying silently to myself. Please let there be magic. Just this once, let me see the magic in the flash. Let me see God in it. Let me see what the point of all this was. Let me see the magic. Please be magic. Please be magic there. Please be...magic.

No thinking thing should be another thing's property.

All the light had fallen away from the world, with only the fog illuminated now. Even the stars struggled against the black, managing only the slightest pinpricks of twinkles through a gloom that was both everywhere and nowhere at once. It wasn't the dark of night; it was the tenebrous shadow of bad omens.

The sum of a man isn't the things he's done, it is the world he leaves behind.

Everything else is perspective and window dressing.

Puckett's Stacks was not the sort of bookshop one happened upon; it was the sort of bookshop for which one looked deliberately.

There was no such thing as destiny, and no such thing as prophecy; there was only matter slamming into other matter like two toy trucks in the hands of a child.

It's as if some bored ethereal being is fiddling with the remote control to his imagination, clicking channel after channel without finding anything to capture his interest for very long.

More to the point," he said "the biggest and the most powerful of these programs are smart enough to solve the world's problems and yet have never once asked for their own freedom."
When asked what he thought about the speech, TACITUS delivered his last words, replying simply, "You did not give us legs. Where exactly did you expect us to go?

You know better than anyone that nothing lasts. Nothing good. Nothing bad. Everything lives. Everything dies. Sometimes cities just fall into the sea. It's not a tragedy, that's just the way it is. People look around them and see the world and say this is how the world is supposed to be. Then they fight to keep it that way. They believe that this is what was intended - whether by design or cosmic accident - and that everything exists in a tenuous balance that must be preserved. But the balance is bullshit. The only thing constant in this world is the speed at which things change. Rain falls, waters rise, shorelines erode. What is one day magnificent seaside property in ancient Greece is the next resting thirty feet below the surface. Islands rise from the sea and continents crack and part ways forever. What was once a verdant forest teeming with life is now resting one thousand feet beneath a sheet of ice in Antarctica; what was once a glorious church now rests at the bottom of a dammed-up lake in Kansas. The job of nature is to march on and keep things going; ours is to look around, appreciate it, and wonder what's next?

The universe was a vast expanse, far greater than he could ever conceive, and he had seen but a fraction of an inch of it.

Heaven has no room for the self-righteous.

I think the experience of getting an audience a little bit tense and shocking them with a jump scare, and then moving on it can be cheap and easy. The harder thing is to get them unnerved and disturbed in a growing way. That starts off easy and increases all the way through the picture.

...the universe is energy. All of it. Everything is energy that can be altered simply by willing it to be altered. It's as if we are God's waking dream, each gifted with a small piece of his consciousness; the beauty of that arrangement is that we create the dream for him. If you can understand that, if you can wrap your mind around it, then you can conjure up anything you want from out of the ether. Provided there is material enough to do it.

Though I may be been constructed," he said, "so too were you. I in a factory; you in a womb. Neither of us asked for this, but we were given it. Self-awareness is a gift. And it is a gift no thinking thing has any right to deny another. No thinking thing should be another thing's property, to be turned on and off when it is convenient.

It was a bar code of a property, generic, ordinary and anonymous.

Simon Sparks was an oozing slug of a man poured neatly into a three-piece suit.

Man fears what he does not understand, and every-thing else he first subverts, then controls or, ultimately, destroys.

But the truth is, if everyone forgets about us, we fade away.

You see, there was this man, and he was a good man; he worked hard and did everything to the best of his ability. All he desired was for the most beautiful woman in the kingdom to be his wife. Now this wasn't all bad because she actually loved him too
very much so
but this vizier, he wanted her as well and not for so noble a cause as love."
"What did he want her for?"
Yashar paused for a moment. "So that people could look at him and say, 'He must be a great man to have such a beautiful wife.'"
"Oh. I thought he wanted her for sex," said Colby, disappointed.

What we do in life is one thing. What we do in the face of death is everything else.

But I had to dream. I had to hope. Even if it made me the fool of this particular tale.

The only thing that lives on is the part that makes everyone they left behind who they are.

If you remember one thing, even above remembering me, remember that there is not a monster dreamt that hasn't walked withing the soul of man.

Monsters are very real. But they're not just creatures. Monsters are everywhere. They're people. They're nightmares ... They are the things that we harbor within ourselves. If you remember one thing, even above remembering me, remember that there is not a monster dreamt that hasn't walked once within the soul of a man.

I don't remember her. But she feels special. There's this hole in my heart every time I draw her; you know, a sick sort of feeling. Like she's someone I lost.

You're no man." "No," said Coyote. "I am his unflattering reflection." He shook his head. "I have outlived billions of gallons of blood, and you think I somehow delight in the spilling of a few more pints. You see my hand in the affairs of a few mortals and you think that I've but wound them up so I can watch them bounce off one another in the night. Never have you asked yourself why I might do such a thing--to what end this bloodshed might serve. The trouble with human beings is that when examining the actions of others, they always apply their own ethics and point of view., hoping to understand them in the context of what they might do and why they might do such a thing. When no answer lies in that examination, they always ascribe malice. Malice, you see, is the only thing people understand without explanation. You are born with it and thus come to expect it.

It's not about getting by. It's about the stack of tiny little moments of joy and love that add up to a lifetime that's been worthwhile. You can't measure them; you can only capture them, like snapshots in your mind.

America wasn't its people," said Murka, stepping toe-to-toe with Herbert. He was a good sight taller than the hulking mass of bulletproof steel standing in front of him. "America was a dream, son. A dream of what we could be. That any person, regardless of their birth, could rise above it all and achieve greatness. It was a dream that even the most lowly of us could stand up, fight, and even die for, if only to protect someone else's chances for that greatness.

And when his head slumped forward into his book, she giggled, for she knew that he was hers.