Robin Sloan Quotes

At first I thought I had a crush on her, but then I realized she's an android. ~ Robin Sloan

Lapin breaks away from Broadway and picks a path toward Telegraph Hill. Her velocity is steady, even as the landscape rises underneath her; she's the little eccentric that could. ~ Robin Sloan

Lost in the shadows of the shelves, I almost fall off the ladder. I am exactly halfway up. The floor of the bookstore is far below me, the surface of a planet I've left behind. ~ Robin Sloan

I felt the disorientation of a generous offer that in no way lines up with anything you want to do: like a promotion to senior alligator wrestling, or an all-expenses paid trip to Gary, Indiana. ~ Robin Sloan

I needed a more interesting life.
I could start by learning something.
I could start with the starter. ~ Robin Sloan

That's what spies do, right? They walk to the bakery and buy a loaf of bread everyday - perfectly normal - until one day they buy a loaf of uranium instead. ~ Robin Sloan

Immortality in a book-lined catacomb down beneath the surface of the earth, or death up here, with all this? I'll take death and a kebab. ~ Robin Sloan

I have come to believe that food is history of the deepest kind. Everything we eat tells a tale of ingenuity and creation, domination and injustice-and does so more vividly than any other artifact, any other medium. ~ Robin Sloan

This job has three requirements, each very strict. Do not agree to them lightly. Clerks in this store have followed these rules for nearly a century, and I will not have them broken now. ( ... ) Two: You may not browse, read, or otherwise inspect the shelved volumes. Retrieve them for members. That is all"
( ... )
"You must keep precise records of all transactions. The time. The customer's appearance. His state of mind. How he asks for the book. How he receives it. Does he appear to be injured. Is he wearing a sprig of rosemary on his hat. And so on ~ Robin Sloan

People want things to be real. If you give them an excuse, they'll believe you. ~ Robin Sloan

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. ~ Robin Sloan

Why do you love books so much? ~ Robin Sloan

The outer perimeter of the facility is like a highway; this must be where all the popular artifacts hang out. ~ Robin Sloan

The Con-U storage facility is the most amazing space I have ever seen. Keep in mind that I recently worked at a vertical bookstore and even more recently visited a secret subterranean library. Keep in mind, also, that I saw the Sistine Chapel when I was a kid, and , as part of science camp, I got to visit a particle accelerator. This warehouse has them all beat. ~ Robin Sloan

Magic is not the only power in this world. ~ Robin Sloan

At Crowley Control Systems in Southfield, the message we received from Clark Crowley, delivered in an amble around the office every month or so, was: Keep up the fine work folks! At General Dexterity in San Francisco, the message we received from Andrei, delivered in a quantitative business update every Tuesday and Thursday, was: We are on a mission to remake the conditions of human labor, so push harder, all of you.

I began to wonder if, in fact, I knew how to push hard. In Michigan, my family all had families and extremely serious hobbies. Here, the wraiths were stripped bare: human-shaped generators of CAD and code. ~ Robin Sloan

Its circumference was tiny, but he had a life, and he would not give it up. ~ Robin Sloan

I will admit that I just want an excuse to put all my favorite people in a room together. ~ Robin Sloan

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. ~ Robin Sloan

Turning the pages of this encoded codex, I realize that the books I love most are like open cities, with all sorts of ways to wander in. This thing is a fortress with no front gate. You're meant to scale the walls, stone by stone. ~ Robin Sloan

The smell!" Penumbra repeats. "You know you are finished when people start talking about the smell. ~ Robin Sloan

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

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

Moffat's prose is fine: clear and steady, with just enough sweeping statements about destiny and dragons to keep things well inflated. The characters are appealing archetypes: Fernwen the scholarly dwarf is the everynerd, doing his best to live through the adventure. Telemach Half-Blood is the hero you wish you could be. He always has a plan, always has a solution, always has secret allies that he can call upon - pirates and sorcerers whose allegiance he earn with long-ago sacrifices. ~ Robin Sloan

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

In your message, you told me about your family, how you don't have any traditions. The first time I read that, it made me sad, but then I thought about it for a while and started to feel jealous. Lois, think about it! No one cares if your restaurant has tables. You can build robots, or bake bread, or do something else entirely. You're unencumbered by culture. You're... light! ~ Robin Sloan

Your parents are weirdos, in the best possible way. They do not celebrate birthdays; never in your life have you received a present on the tenth of December. Instead, you are given books on the days that their authors were born. ~ Robin Sloan

he saw that Gerritszoon was a searcher, too. ~ Robin Sloan

How do I know that? Does my brain have an app for that? ~ Robin Sloan

Oh, I am very familiar with the internal monologue. ~ Robin Sloan

Once told, stories take on a life of their own. ~ Robin Sloan

We were looking at the sequence, not the shape. ~ Robin Sloan

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. ~ Robin Sloan

Rosemary, why do you love books so much?"
( ... )
"Well, actually, I love books because books are my best friends. ~ Robin Sloan

Let me be candid. If I had to rank book-acquisition experiences in order of comfort, ease, and satisfaction, the list would go like this: 1. The perfect independent bookstore, like Pygmalion in Berkeley. 2. A big, bright Barnes & Noble. I know they're corporate, but let's face it - those stores are nice. Especially the ones with big couches. 3. The book aisle at Walmart. (It's next to the potting soil.) 4. The lending library aboard the U.S.S. West Virginia, a nuclear submarine deep beneath the surface of the Pacific. 5. Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. ~ Robin Sloan

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. ~ Robin Sloan

The way he says it, I can hear the capital letters. ~ Robin Sloan

My name is Clay Jannon and those were the days when I rarely touched paper. ~ Robin Sloan

But down below, Penumbra is shouting, "Lean, my boy! Lean!"
And wow, do I ever want this job. ~ Robin Sloan

To tell you the truth, I hate audiobooks.
But an audiobook is like a fizzy knit cap pulled down over your - ~ Robin Sloan

The buzz about Google these days is that it's like America itself: still the biggest game in town, but inevitably and irrevocably on the decline. Both are superpowers with unmatched resources, but both are faced with fast-growing rivals, and both will eventually be eclipsed. For America, that rival is China. For Google, it's Facebook. (This is all from tech-gossip blogs, so take it with a grain of salt. They also say a startup called MonkeyMoney is going to be huge next year.) But here's the difference: staring down the inevitable, America pays defense contractors to build aircraft carriers. Google pays brilliant programmers to do whatever they want. ~ Robin Sloan

What do you seek in these shelves? ~ Robin Sloan

This is Mat's secret weapon, his passport, his get-out-of-jail-free card: Mat makes things that are beautiful. ~ Robin Sloan

But, of course, the point of a programming language is that you don't just read it; you write it, too. You make it do things for you. And this, I think, is where Ruby shines ( ... ) ~ Robin Sloan

The Golden Horn of Griffo is finely wrought," Zenodotus said, tracing his finger along the curve of Telemach's treasure. "And the magic is in its making alone. Do you understand? There is no sorcery here - none that I can detect. ~ Robin Sloan

This sounds very interesting to me, but mostly because this girl is very interesting to me. ~ Robin Sloan

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. ~ Robin Sloan

Do people even look at one another?"
"Not really. Everything that matters is on your screen. There's an agenda that rearranges itself. There's a back-channel chat. And there's fact-checking! If you get up to speak, there are people cross-referencing your claims, supporting and refuting you
"
It sounds like an engineer's Athens. ~ Robin Sloan

All the secrets of the world worth knowing are hiding in plain sight. ~ Robin Sloan

Of course, of course. Drugs, music, a new age dawning ... and you came for an old book. ~ Robin Sloan

Corvina's got it wrong. Penumbra's schemes didn't fail because he's a hopeless crackpot. If Corvina's right, it means nobody should ever try anything new and risky. Maybe Penumbra's schemes failed because he didn't have enough help. Maybe he didn't have a Mat or a Neel, an Ashley or a Kat - until now. Corvina ~ Robin Sloan

I know I have strong opinions about everything - I can't help it, I do - but this one's the strongest. I waited too long to get out of that office. Much too long. I weep for those years. ~ Robin Sloan

She's wearing the same red and yellow BAM! T-shirt from before, which means (a) she slept in, (b) she owns several identical T-shirts, or (c) she's a cartoon character - all of which are appealing alternatives. ~ Robin Sloan

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

We take the subway.Grumble's next message came through after breakfast, and it said:
theres a grumblegear3k waiting for you at 11 jay street in dumbo. ask for the hogwarts special. hold the shrooms. ~ Robin Sloan

Hadoop! I love the sound of it. Kat Potente, you and I will have a son, and we will name him Hadoop, and he will be a great warrior, a king! ~ Robin Sloan

I feel crazy, but in a good way. ~ Robin Sloan

Kat is talking to someone else now, a slender brown-skinned boy who's joined the line just behind her. He's dressed like a skater, so I assume he has a PhD in artificial intelligence. ~ Robin Sloan

But I think the writers had their turn," she says, "and now it's programmers who get to upgrade the human operating system. ~ Robin Sloan

This is no library. This is the Batcave. ~ Robin Sloan

Girl Talk, produced by Andy Warhol. ~ Robin Sloan

But it will make mistakes," she says. "Hadoop will probably get us from a hundred thousand buildings down to, like, five thousand."
"So we're down to five days instead of five years."
"Wrong!" Kat says. "Because guess what
we have ten thousand friends. It's called"
she clicks a tab triumphantly and fat yellow letters appear on the screen
"Mechanical Turk. Instead of sending jobs to computers, like Hadoop, it sends jobs to real people. Lots of them. Mostly Estonians."
She commands King Hadoop and ten thousand Estonian footmen. She is unstoppable. ~ Robin Sloan

I tell him, and I write it down as I go. It makes me feel better, as if the weirdness is flowing out of my blood and onto the page, through the dark point of the pen ~ Robin Sloan

We need James Bond with a library science degree. ~ Robin Sloan

At General Dexterity, I was contributing to an effort to make repetitive labor obsolete. After a trainer in the Task Acquisition Center taught an arm how to do something, all the arms did it perfectly, forever,

In other words, you solved a problem once, and then you moved on to other more interesting things.

Baking, by contrast, was solving the same problem over and over again, because every time, the solution was consumed. I mean, really: chewed and digested.

Thus, the problem was ongoing.

Thus, the problem was perhaps the point. ~ Robin Sloan

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

Our friendship is a nebula. ~ Robin Sloan

The shelves were packed close together, and it felt like I was standing at the border of a forest
not a friendly Californian forest, either, but an old Transylvanian forest, a forest full of wolves and witches and dagger-wielding bandits all waiting just beyond moonlight's reach. ~ Robin Sloan

It was a fungal party hellscape. ~ Robin Sloan

I wonder if Cheryl realizes how historically significant the contents of this cardboard box are. "Oh, honey," she says, waving her hand, "everything in there is a treasure to somebody. ~ Robin Sloan

Our friendship is a nebula. Now ~ Robin Sloan

I didn't realize wizards were going to walk among us and we'd just call them Googlers. ~ Robin Sloan

Programming is not all the same. Normal written languages have different rhythms and idioms, right? Well, so do programming languages. The language called C is all harsh imperatives, almost raw computer-speak. The language called Lisp is like one long, looping sentence, full of subclauses, so long in fact that you usually forget what it was even about in the first place. The language called Erlang is just like it sounds: eccentric and Scandinavian. ~ Robin Sloan

Some of them are working hard indeed."
"What are they doing?"
"My boy!" he said, eyebrows raised. As if nothing could be more obvious: "They are reading. ~ Robin Sloan

At Google, they eat lunch on graph paper. ~ Robin Sloan

I'm going to put the moves on her,' he says gravely. 'Things might get weird.' He says it like a commando setting up a midnight raid. Like: Sure, this is going to be extraordinarily dangerous, but don't worry. I've done it before. ~ Robin Sloan

To be honest, my life has exhibited many strange and sometimes troubling characteristics, but shortness is not one of them. It feels like an eternity since I started school and a techno-social epoch since I moved to San Francisco. My phone couldn't even connect to the internet back then. ~ Robin Sloan

It's always new and astonishing when it's yours. Infatuation; sex; card tricks. ~ Robin Sloan

I told them I didn't have time for this bullshit, and if either of them wanted to ask a lady out, he could do it by text message like a normal person. ~ Robin Sloan

Penumbra [...] produces another e-reader - it's a Nook. Then another one, a Sony. Another one, marked KOBO. Really? Who has a Kobo? ~ Robin Sloan

Stuff that used to be hard just isn't hard anymore! ~ Robin Sloan

Corvina must have been so different then ... really literally a different person. At what point do you make that call? At what point should you just give someone a new name? Sorry, no, you don't get to be Corvina anymore. Now you're Corvina 2.0 - a dubious upgrade. ~ Robin Sloan

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. ~ Robin Sloan

Don't forget your ruler on your first day of cult! ~ Robin Sloan

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. ~ Robin Sloan

You know, old books are a big problem for us. Old knowledge in general. We call it OK. Old knowledge, OK. Did you know that ninety-five percent of the internet was only created in the last five years? But we know that when it comes to all human knowledge, the ratio is just the opposite - in fact, OK accounts for most things that people know, and have ever known. ~ Robin Sloan

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 ~ Robin Sloan

Thank you, Teobaldo. You are my greatest friend. This has been the key to everything. ~ Robin Sloan

And even if I fail-this is always the archivist's consolation-perhaps I will have laid a foundation for someone wiser. ~ Robin Sloan

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. ~ Robin Sloan

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

Yes, everyone else is smart, everyone else is cool, everyone else is healthy and attractive - but she brought you. ~ Robin Sloan

I'm sorry, but I just don't believe in your ... religion, ~ Robin Sloan

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

He's like a storybook spirit, a little djinn or something, except instead of air or water his element is imagination. ~ Robin Sloan

Why do organizations need to mark everything with their insignia? It's like a dog peeing on every tree. Google is the same way. So was NewBagel. Using ~ Robin Sloan

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

Maybe I'll just go ahead and buy her the Tufte book. I'll bring it wrapped in brown paper. Wait- is that weird? It's an expensive book. Maybe there's a low-key paperback edition. I could buy it on Amazon. That's stupid, I work at a bookstore. (Could Amazon ship it fast enough?) ~ Robin Sloan

This is not an ordinary bookstore."
"Indeed. It seems more akin to a youth hostel – ~ Robin Sloan

Books: boring. Codes: awesome. These are the people who are running the internet. ~ Robin Sloan