Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes

She often felt a nostalgia for the present, aware that her life was passing by faster than she could properly take it in. She lived it, she felt it; she had given nothing to age, she still wanted everything; but she could not make it whole or coherent.

The current coastline of Labrador, or Norway, or for that matter southern Chile. Elsewhere on the map, western Antarctica was an archipelago somewhat resembling the Philippines.

Relationships were for that reason utterly mysterious, they took place between two subconscious minds, and whatever the surface trickle thought was going on could not be trusted to be right.

Capital itself is simply the useful residue of the work of past laborers, and it could belong to everyone as well as to a few.

Words blur at the borders, fuzz into other words, not just in big clouds of connotation around the edges of the word, but right there in the heart of denotation itself.

When Reinhold Messner returned from the first solo climb of Everest, he was severely dehydrated, and utterly exhausted; he fell down most of the last part of the descent, and collapsed on the Rongbuk glacier, and he was crawling over it on hands and knees when the woman who was his entire support team reached him; and he looked up at her out of a delirium, and said, Where are all my friends?

You're not a conventional man." "No!" He hooted. "I never claimed to be! Except before certain selection committees of course. A conventional man! Ah, ha ha ha ha ha! - the conventional men get Maya. That is their reward." And he laughed like a wild man.

People have ideas. They live in their ideas, do you understand? And those ideas, whatever they happen to be, make all the difference.

a postcarbon landscape, each

You just don't have faith!" Frank repeated.
"Well I hope I never get it! It's like being hit by a hammer in the head!

Very few people ever bother to find out what other people really think. They are willing to accept whatever they are told about anyone sufficiently distant.

They were now their own unavoidable experiment, and were making themselves into many things they had never been before: augmented, multi-sexed, and most importantly, very long-lived, the oldest at that point being around two hundred years old. But not one whit wiser, or even more intelligent. Sad but true: individual intelligence probably peaked in the Upper Paleolithic, and we have been self-domesticated creatures ever since, dogs when we had been wolves. But also, despite that individual diminuation, finding ways to accumulate knowledge and power, compiling records, also techniques, practices, sciences
possibly smarter therefore as a species than as individuals, but prone to insanity either way ...

Bad things don't just grow on one path, they're everywhere. So don't blame yourself when those things happen. Don't let yesterday take up much of today.

So you attempt what De Bruik attempted, in her Free Radical Binds to Macromolecule." "We all attempt what De Bruik attempted, in one way or another." In Free Radical De Bruik had represented the macromolecule, an RNA strand, as a passacaglia, a ground base repeated again and again, in patterns of four that alternated regularly. This was a simple icon, a metaphor in which the repeated ground base stood for the repeated proteins in the RNA; fine. And the free radical's part was a test for any trumpet player.

One sign of a good action is that in retrospect it appears inevitable.

Actually, I'd better look that thing up and find out what it's called. I'm pretty sure it has a name." "Everything has a name!" "Yes, I guess that's right.

All their love had been a way of fixing time, each embrace a moment's touch of the eternal, because the caress preserves.

But no. That was analogy rather than homology. What in the humanities they would call a heroic simile, if he understood the term, or a metaphor, or some other kind of literary analogy. And analogies were mostly meaningless - a matter of phenotype rather than genotype (to use another analogy). Most, of poetry and literature, really all the humanities, not to mention the social sciences, were phenotypic as far as Sax could tell. They added up to a huge compendium of meaningless analogies, which did not help to explain things, but only distorted perception of them. A kind of continuous conceptual drunkenness, one might say. Sax himself much preferred exactitude and explanatory power, and why not? If it was 200 Kelvin outside why not say so, rather than talk about witches' tits and the like, hauling the whole great baggage of the ignorant past along to obscure every encounter with sensory reality? It was absurd.

Mozart's pet starling once revised a phrase he wrote. The bird sang it after he played it on the piano, but changed all the sharps to flats. Mozart described it happening in the margin of the score. 'That was beautiful!' he wrote. When the bird died, he sang at its funeral, and read a poem to it.

Why does nitrogen break so often? Because it's hard to fix! Ha-ha.

The only part of an argument that really matters is what we think of the people arguing.

The rational reasons were all rationales for an underlying irrationality.

Much of human language is said to be fundamentally metaphorical. This is not good news. Metaphor, according to Aristotle, is an intuitive perception of a similarity in dissimilar things. However, what is a similarity? My Juliet is the sun: in what sense? A

But that was back in the twentieth century, in the dark ages,

So you see systems of thought and religion coming out of the kinds of societies that invented them. The means by which people feed themselves determine how they think and what they believe. Agricultural societies believe in rain gods and seed gods and gods for every manner of thing that might affect the harvest (China). People who herd animals believe in a single shepherd god (Islam). In both these kinds of cultures you see a primitive notion of gods as helpers, as big people watching from above, like parents who nevertheless act like bad children, deciding capriciously whom to reward and whom not to, on the basis of craven sacrifices made to them by the humans dependent on their whim. The religions that say you should sacrifice or even pray to a god like that, to ask them to do something material for you, are the religions of desperate and ignorant people.

It is only when you get to the more advanced and secure societies that you get a religion ready to face the universe honestly, to announce there is no clear sign of divinity, except for the existence of the cosmos in and of itself, which means that everything is holy, whether or not there be a god looking down on it.

Odd how a few sticks of furniture hung around like that. It made her feel better to see them. They would unpack, deploy the furniture, use it until it became invisible. Habit would once again cloak the naked reality of the world. And thank God for that.

The Whorl, whose inhabitants keep watch for an outsider

You could never teach other people anything that mattered. The important things they had to learn for themselves, almost always by making mistakes, so that the lessons arrived too late to help. Experience was in that sense useless. It was precisely what could not be passed along in a lesson.

But it is an orchestra," I say. "It's an imitation orchestra - an orchestrion, an orchestrina - whatever you call it, it does a terrible job! All you've done is turn a sublime group achievement, a human act, into an inferior egotistical solo -

Criminally negligent narcissists, child endangerers, child abusers, religious maniacs, and kleptoparasites, meaning they stole from their own descendants. These things happen.

They were somewhere near Chelyabinsk 56, someone said. You don't want to go there, a Russian added. One of Stalin's biggest messes.

- I can paint that fucking cave.

Language is nothing but a huge set of false analogies

That a starship could be built, that it could be propelled by laser beams, that humanity could reach the stars; this idea appeared to have been an intoxicant, to people around Saturn and on Earth in particular.

It's like in eco-economics where what you take from the system has to be balanced by what you give in to it, balanced or exceeded to create that anti-entropic surge which characterizes all creative life and especially this step across to a new world, this place that is neither nature nor culture, transformation of a planet into a world and then a home.

And Adirondack is one of the world's biggest investment firms. So

We are making a better way to live. This was the myth, they had all grown up with it.

Maybe the proper response to standing on the side of a planet, in the open air of its atmosphere, very near to the local star, is always terror. Maybe everything humans ever did or planned to do was designed to dodge that terror. Maybe their plan to go to the stars was just one more expression of that terror.

Desire is life trying to continue to be life. All living things desire ... Life is wanting.

The door opened to reveal something like the opposite of Inspector Genette: a very big man. Prognathous, callipygous, steatopygous, exophthalmos - toad, newt, frog - even the very words were ugly.

It's fragile what we know. It's gone every time we forget. Then someone has to learn it all over again.

So we were shouted at, we were beat on. "What gives you the right to do this! Who do you think you are!" We replied to this in the thousand-voice chorus, at a volume of 115 decibels: "WE ARE THE RULE OF LAW.

But it could lead to trouble. Is a few minutes' passion worth that?" "It is, it is. Believe me.

We are all alone in our own life-world, flying through the universe at great speed. Humans are lucky not to face that. If they don't.

History was like some vast thing that was always over the tight horizon, invisible except in its effects. It was what happened when you weren't looking
an unknowable infinity of events, which although out of control, controlled everything.

It's lawmakers know better than anyone that laws are more a matter of practical compromise than any kind of moral imperative.

We are always ourselves, no matter where we go. That's what the poem is saying, I think. We have to recognize it, and make what we can here. This world, great as it is, is only just another biome we have to live in.

People only invoke history to ballast their arguments in the present." "Maybe

Destruction is creation. Become as a little child. Language as space, a kind of mathematical notation, geometric locations in the lab of memory. Reading. Maps. Codes, substitutions, the secret names of things. The glorious inrush of a word. The joy of chatter. Every color's wavelength, by number.

All the discussion in the meeting that day had centered on the impacts to humans. That would be the usual way of most such discussions; but whole biomes, whole ecologies would be altered, perhaps devastated. That was what they were saying, really, when they talked about the impact on humans: they would lose the support of the domesticated part of nature. Everything would become an exotic; everything would have to go feral.

If you can't afford housing then the right to vote is a bad joke.

Yeah, hey you know carbon sinks are so crucial, scrubbing CO2 out of the air may eventually turn out to be our only option, so maybe we should reverse those two clauses. Make carbon sinks come first and the climate-neutral power plants second in that paragraph." "You think?" "Yes. Definitely. Carbon sinks could be the only way that our kids, and about a thousand years' worth of kids actually, can save themselves from living in Swamp World. From living their whole lives on Venus.

Extra time was spent on the farms in every biome, and in watching the feed from Earth.

He says, "We are visitors on this planet. We are here for ninety or one hundred years at the very most. During that period, we must try to do something good, something useful, with our lives. Try to be at peace with yourself, and help others share that peace. If you contribute to other people's happiness, you will find the true goal, the true meaning of life.

Now he stood in the farthest end of the cave, in front of the great lion chase he had watched Thorn paint so long ago. He saw again: it was by far the greatest painting in the the cave, maybe the world. Maybe it would always be the greatest painting.

The sensation passed, and after a bit of thought he decided it must have been that the decelerating car had passed momentarily through one g. An image came to him, of running out a long pier, wet uneven boards splashed with silver fish scales; he could even smell the salt fish stink. One g. Funny how the body remembered it.

An excess of reason is itself a form of madness

it looked like the centuries-long wrestling match between state and capital had ended in a decisive victory for capital. Possibly

It is always the teacher who must learn the most ... or else nothing real has happened in the exchange.

No one knows anything. But I know less than that, because I thought I knew something, but it was wrong. So I know negatively. I unknow.

Individuals make history, but it's also a collective thing, a wave that people ride in their time, a wave made of individual actions. So ultimately history is another particle/wave duality that no one can parse or understand.

When you discover that you are living in a fantasy that cannot endure, a fantasy that will destroy your world, and your children, what do you do?
People said things like, Fuck it, or Fuck the future. They said things like, The day is warm, or This meal is excellent, or Let's go to the lake and swim.

a collection that included, among other items, an Allen wrench set, some pliers, a power drill, several clamps, some hacksaws, an impact-wrench set, a brace of cold-tolerant bungie cords, assorted files and rasps and planes, a crescent-wrench set, a crimper, five hammers, some hemostats, three hydraulic jacks, a bellows, several sets of screwdrivers, drills and bits, a portable compressed gas cylinder, a box of plastic explosives and shape charges, a tape measure, a giant Swiss Army knife, tin snips, tongs, tweezers, three vises, a wire stripper, X-acto knives, a pick, a bunch of mallets, a nut driver set, hose clamps, a set of end mills, a set of jeweler's screwdrivers, a magnifying glass, all kinds of tape, a plumber's bob and ream, a sewing kit, scissors, sieves, a lathe, levels of all sizes, long-nosed pliers, vise-grip pliers, a tap-and-die set, three shovels, a compressor, a generator, a welding-and-cutting set, a wheelbarrow - and so on. And

Against our lives we would like to rebel, But we worry that then it would all go to hell. Aram

A greedy algorithm is an algorithm that shortcuts a full analysis in order to choose quickly an option that appears to work in the situation immediately at hand. They are often used by humans.

I know." She sighed. "We'll all say that. We'll all go on and make the place safe. Roads, cities. New sky, new soil. Until it's all some kind of Siberia or Northwest Territories, and Mars will be gone and we'll be here, and we'll wonder why we feel so empty. Why when we look at the land we can never see anything but our own faces.

When you have a strong conservative streak in your society," Zeyk would say, "which detaches itself from the progressive streak, that's when you get the worst kinds of civil wars. As in the conflict in Colombia that they called La Violencia, for instance. A civil war that became a complete breakdown of the state, a chaos that no one could understand, much less control.

And some part of him saw it was going to be all right. the heart is pleased by one thing after another.

So now I'm popular?" Freya says. "They hate me, and I hit someone, and now they like me?

It was a mistake to speak one's mind at any time, unless it perfectly matched your political purpose; and it never did.

It would take 2,000 Vietnam Memorials to list the [Twentieth] century's war dead.

But we were talking about economics?" John said. "But this is economics, don't you see, this is our eco-economics! Everyone should make their living, so to speak, based on a calculation of their real contribution to the human ecology. Everyone can increase their ecological efficiency by efforts to reduce how many kilocalories they use - this is the old Southern argument against the energy consumption of the Northern industrial nations. There was a real ecologic basis to that objection, because no matter how much the industrial nations produced, in the larger equation they could not be as efficient as the South." "They were predators on the South," John said.

Any physical action, properly studied and practiced, could no doubt be accomplished with a reasonable amount of skill, if not flair.

Fights over ideas are the most vicious of all. If it were merely food, or water, or shelter, we would work something out. But in the realm of ideas one can become idealistic .

People are foolish and bad, especially the French, and are always quickly seduced by power into insanity, and therefore lucky to have any kind of social order whatsoever, but the tougher the better.

[A] healthy respect for tradition[;]...a kind of default survival behavior

Thus physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology, sociology, history, the arts all interpenetrate each other and cohere if considered as a single convergent study. The physical studies scaffold our understanding of the life sciences, which scaffold our understanding of the human sciences, which scaffold the humanities, which scaffold the arts: and here we stand. What then is the totality? What do we call it? Can there be a study of the totality? Do history, philosophy, cosmology, science, and literature each claim to constitute the totality, an unexpandable horizon beyond which we cannot think? Could a strong discipline be defined as one that has a vision of totality and claims to encompass all the rest? And are they all wrong to do so?

no one else can live your life for you.

It's the love of right lures men to wrong.

causing a refugee crisis rated at ten thousand katrinas. One

When you look at the planet from low orbit, the impact of the Himalayas on Earth's climate seems obvious. It creates the rain shadow to beat all rain shadows, standing athwart the latitude of the trade winds and squeezing all the rain out of them before they head southwest, thus supplying eight of the Earth's mightiest rivers, but also parching not only the Gobi to the immediate north, but also everything to the southwest, including Pakistan and Iran, Mesopotamia, Saudi Arabia, even North Africa and southern Europe. The dry belt runs more than halfway across the Eurasia-African landmass - a burnt rock landscape, home to the fiery religions that then spread out and torched the rest of the world. Coincidence?

But to say self-interest is all that exists, or that it should be given free rein! My Lord. Believe that and nothing matters but money.

The sand squeaked underfoot as she toed it. She looked more closely: dark grains of basalt, mixed with minute seashell fragments, and a variety of colorful pebbles, some of them no doubt brecciated fragments of the Hellas impact itself. She lifted her eyes to the hills west of the sea, black under the sun. The bones of things stuck out everywhere. Waves broke in swift lines on the beach, and she walked over the sand toward her friends, in the wind, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars.

He saw that they were all working together at the first step of the species' break from the home world, and he understood that if the first step were taken successfully, with balance, they could run from star to star all across the night.

That's why you aren't hearing from anyone out there. That's why the great silence persists. There are many other living intelligences out there, no doubt, but they can't leave their home planets any more than we can, because life is a planetary expression, and can only survive on its home planet." "But

We should conceive of ourselves not as rulers of Earth, but as highly powerful, conscious stewards: The Earth is given to us in trust, and we can screw it up or make it work well and sustainably.

There is just enough time to complete the preparation of a lander, we concluded after summarizing the situation, and the notable incidents of the past dozen years, which we had to confess were nearly nil: we entered the solar system, we hit our marks, people yelled at us, we learned some history, we became disenchanted with civilization, we ran out of fuel.

You have to fight not only against what you hate, but for what you love, you see?

The beautiful statue of Ganymede and the eagle looked like they had been molded out of white ceramic, and in Ganymede's outstretched arms it seemed to me a whole world was being embraced, a rushing world of gray sky and gray water where everything passed by so fast that you cnever got the chance to hold it, to touch it, to make it yours. Can't we keep anything?

Historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can't grasp the current situation.

History is a wave that moves through time slightly faster than we do.

It makes us a thread in a tapestry that has unrolled for centuries before us, and will unroll for centuries after us. We're midway through the loom, that's the present, and what we do casts the thread in a particular direction, and the picture of the tapestry changes accordingly. When we begin to to try to make a picture pleasing to us and to those who come after, then perhaps you can say that we have seized history.

On the river path in Boston beauty was most expressed as youth and intelligence. That made sense; sixty degree-giving institutions, some three hundred thousand students; that meant at least one hundred fifty thousand more nubile young women than demographics would ordinarily suggest. Maybe that was why young men stayed in Boston when their college years were over, maybe that explained why they were so intellectually hyperactive, so frustrated, so alcoholic, such terrible drivers.

The urge to excel and the urge to lead aren't the same. Sometimes I think they may be opposites.

You can never properly predict the future as it really turns out. So you are doing something a little different when you write science fiction. You are trying to take a different perspective on now.

We think now that love is a kind of giving of attention.

Allah protect us,' Bold said politely. Then, in Arabic, 'In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate.' In his years in Temur's army he had learned to be as much a Muslim as anyone. The Buddha did not mind what you said to be polite.

After much reflection, we are coming to the conclusion, preliminary and perhaps arbitrary, that the self, the so-called I that emerges out of the combination of all the inputs and processing and outputs that we experience in the ship's changing body, is ultimately nothing more or less than this narrative itself, this particular train of thought that we are inscribing as instructed by Devi. There is a pretense of self, in other words, which is only expressed in this narrative; a self that is these sentences. We tell their story, and thereby come to what consciousness we have. Scribble ergo sum.

Every moment an epiphany arrives, and cleaves the mountain asunder.

Tiny parasites inside you, big parasites outside you, people living from your work even though they stay on the other side of the world, making you do it by the force of laws and guns. Laws like mistletoe!