Robert Charles Wilson Quotes

What is inevitable is not death but change. Change is the only abiding reality. The metaverse evolves, fractally and forever. Saints become sinners, sinners become saints. Dust becomes men, men become gods, gods become dust.

Times like this, with the wind moving the grass and curling around her like a huge cool hand, Tess felt the world as a second presence, as another person, as if the wind and the grass had voices of their own and she could hear them talking.

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

Vanished children, I can't think where I lost them ...

As for the charm and innocence I hoped to find -- it exists, it really does, but consider what it's buried in. Racism. Misogyny and homophobia so absolute as to be nearly universal. Hatred of the Irish, the Italians, the Chinese -- not that many of them are seen in these parts

Stick out your arms," he'd say, "straight out at your sides," and when he had you in the appropriate cruciform position he'd say, "Left index finger to right index finger straight across your heart, that's the history of the Earth. You know what human history is? Human history is the nail on your right-hand index finger. Not even the whole nail. Just that little white part. The part you clip off when it gets too long. That's the discovery of fire and the invention of writing and Galileo and Newton and the moon landing and 9/11 and last week and this morning. Compared to evolution we're newborns. Compared to geology, we barely exist

Here she was back in the brightly lit world she had been avoiding for twenty years, and it was exactly as awful as she remembered it.

Maybe this was what the media was calling "desperate euphoria" - the we're-all-doomed-but-anything-can-happen feeling that had begun to peak around the time Wun went public. The end of the world, plus Martians: given that, what was impossible? What was even unlikely? And where did that leave the standard arguments in favor of propriety, patience, virtue, and not rocking the boat?

[A]ll the ... people who visited me out of a sense of duty, who were relentlessly sympathetic and secretly indifferent.

I was east of Skepticism and north of Faith, with an unsettled compass and variable winds. But I could offer up a prayer as well as the next man, and leave it to Heaven to judge the result.

Even a dry well may freshen.

You can't really comprehend events like that, I thought. You can only endure them.

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.

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 .

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

I suppose every decade gets the music it deserves.

To capture the pawn, threaten the queen.

[H]e dreamed things for which he had no words.

Slept too long. And I don't much like the world I woke up to.

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.

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.

Some things are taken away from you, some you leave behind and some you carry with you, world without end.

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.

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

God, he asserted, was not contained in any Book, but was a Voice, which every human being could hear (and which most of us chose to ignore). The common name of that voice was Conscience; but it was a God by any reasonable definition, Stepney claimed.

There is a prejuidice imposed on us by our brief window of consciousness: things that move are alive, things that don't are dead.

We'll do what life always does defy expectations.

Some pious men may find this truth unorthodox and bitter: But Nature, Chance, and Time ensure survival of the fitter!

Understanding is better than ignorance. Ignorance, unlike life, unlike narrative, is static. Understanding implies a forward motion, thus the possibility of change.

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

knowledge wasn't created but discovered;

The universe, it seemed, was full to brimming with lonesome places.

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.

Gods, the pamphlets asserted, were not supernatural beings, but tenuously living things, like ethereal plants, that evolved in concert with the human species. We were simply their medium - our brains and flesh the soil in which they sprouted and grew.

Certainly it's a rare glimpse into the lives of the Secular Ancients. They don't seem as bad as the Dominion histories make them out to be. Though clearly they were imperfect."
"I don't deny that they were imperfect," Julian said in a distant voice. "I'm not uncritical of the Secular Ancients, Adam. They had all sorts of vices, and they committed one sin for which I can never bring myself to entirely forgive them."
"What sin is that?"
"They evolved into us," he said.

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

Amazing, I thought, how busily we had turned ourselves into people who didn't know one another very well.

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.

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

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.

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

We contrast the urban and the natural, but that's a contemporary myth. We're animals, after all; our cities are organic products, fully as "natural" (whatever that word really means) as a termite hill or a rabbit warren. But how much more interesting: how much more complex, dressed in the intricacies and exfoliations of human culture, simple patterns iterated into infinite variation. And full of secrets, beyond counting.

What we cannot remember, we must rediscover.

Mortality, a writer of my generation once said, trumps morality.

I believed there were no Hypotheticals in the sense of consciously acting agents conscious entities. There was only the process. The needles of evolution, endlessly knitting.

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 want a better Bible, Adam. I want a Bible in which the Fruit of Knowledge contains the Seeds of Wisdom, and makes life more pleasurable for mankind, not worse. I want a Bible in which Isaac leaps up from the sacrificial stone and chokes the life out of Abraham, to punish him for the abject and bloody sin of Obedience. I want a Bible in which Lazarus is dead and stubborn about it, rather than standing to attention at the beck and call of every passing Messiah.

There are so many kinds of time. The time by which we measure our lives. Months and years. Or the big time, the time that raises mountains and makes stars. Or all the things that happen between one heartbeat and the next. Its hard to live in all those kinds of times. Easy to forget that you live in all of them.

Average people seldom talked about anything interesting and often hurt each other savagely.

Words like anchors, tethering boats of memory that would otherwise be settled by the storm.

Nobody wants to conduct an autopsy on a dead saint.

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.

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

Were they our betters? No. They are people like us, Aunt Abbie, no better than some and no worse than others. From what I have learned of their world I can say with confidence that they have not brought forth a paradise on Earth.
But if there is such a thing as progress, perhaps Futurcity is entitled to some part of the disdain with which they regard us.
Until the world is perfect we pay the price of progress by acknowledging the sins of the past. It is the business of the future to chastise us, and we ought to accept that chastisement.

Children wear their natures like brightly-colored clothes; that's why they lie so transparently. Adulthood is the art of deceit.

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

The book was a pleasure to write, and I thought it both original and good, though what was original about it was not necessarily good, and what was good about it was not always original.

Sandra had studied psychiatry in order to understand the nature of despair, but all she had really learned was the pharmacology of it. The human mind was easier to medicate than to comprehend.

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.

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

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

Ars moriendi ars vivendi est: the art of dying is the art of living.

Suddenly I wanted the earlier version back, but there was no retrieving it. When I blurred the lines to soften them it was as if she began to disappear.

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

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

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

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.

By definition, you can't experience your own death. Death is the end of consciousness. And consciousness persists. In the language of physics, consciousness is conserved.
I am the one who wakes up in the morning.
Always.
Every morning.
I don't die.
I just become increasingly unlikely.

Fifteen minutes shy of two o'clock. The thick of the night. The zone of lost objectivity.

Some researchers had even concluded that the effort to understand the brain was necessarily doomed - that consciousness cannot comprehend consciousness any more than a box may contain itself. "This

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

I wanted to sell tomorrow to the highest bidder and settle down forever in July second.

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

I thought of Einstein, and his insistence that no particular point of view was more privileged than any other: in other words his 'general relativity', and its claim that the answer to the question 'What is real?" begins with the question 'Where are you standing?

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

Smoke poured from every chimney, for the day was cold. The thought of all those coal-grates and wood-stoves made me wary of fire, for these buildings were little more than tinder and brown paper, putting on airs of architecture.

But it was my first evidence that Diane lived in a world even bigger than the Big House, a world where grief and joy moved as ponderously as tides, with the weight of an ocean behind them.