Robert Charles Wilson: Trending quotes

“I won’t put my ignorance on an altar and call it God.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Darwinia

Source: Darwinia (1998), Chapter 15 (p. 136)

God

“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.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Vortex

Source: Vortex (2011), Chapter 32 (p. 327)

Death , Men , God , Reality

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

Robert Charles Wilson book Spin

Variant: Don’t be upset. The world is full of surprises. We’re all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we’re seldom formally introduced.
Source: Spin (2005), p. 438

“You have a knack for turning your eyes inside out, so you see them. And they see you. And you're afraid, because they’re from the uncreated future, from a place, I think, where the human race has reached its last incarnation, from the end of the material world. Perhaps the end of all worlds. And they’re sad—melancholy is the better word—because you're like an angel to them, the angel of the past, the angel of infinite possibility. Possibility lost. The road not taken.”

Robert Charles Wilson

The Observer (p. 111)
The Perseids and Other Stories (2000)

World , Sadness , Angels , Thinking

“The most fundamental parental urge is the urge to nurture and protect. To grieve for a child is to admit ultimate impotence. You can’t protect what goes into the ground. You can’t tuck a blanket around a grave.”

Robert Charles Wilson book The Chronoliths

Source: The Chronoliths (2001), Chapter 13 (p. 156)

Parent

“That worries me. One death is attrition; two would look like incompetence—on someone’s part.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Bios

Source: Bios (1999), Chapter 3 (p. 37)

Death , Parting

“The past was gone, the dead were dead and did not speak, and everybody dies; one day Oberg would be dead and silent, too, and that was as it should be: the broad and welcoming ocean of oblivion. It made life bearable. It was sacred. It should not be tampered with.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Memory Wire

Source: Memory Wire (1987), Chapter 20 (p. 179)

Life , Past , Dead

“Perfect aristocratic tone, Degrandpre thought: insult and menace in a single phrase.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Bios

Source: Bios (1999), Chapter 11 (p. 106)

Perfection

““Don’t tell me. It changed your life.” I was smiling.
She smiled back. “It didn’t even change my mind.””

Robert Charles Wilson

Divided by Infinity (p. 180)
The Perseids and Other Stories (2000)

Life , Smile , Change

“One doesn’t have to understand in order to look. One has to look, in order to understand.”

Robert Charles Wilson

The Observer (p. 112)
The Perseids and Other Stories (2000)

Understanding

“She understood too much. She understood that she had reached her destiny point, that time and the circumstances of her life had conspired to bring her to this place. For one ecstatic moment she was the axis on which the stars revolved.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Bios

Source: Bios (1999), Chapter 15 (p. 140)

Life , Star , Time

“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.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Spin

Source: Spin (2005), p. 59

Truth , Color

“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.”

Robert Charles Wilson

The Observer (p. 113)
The Perseids and Other Stories (2000)

Understanding

““You think Wexler is lying?”
“I think he’s fallible,” Byron had replied.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Memory Wire

Source: Memory Wire (1987), Chapter 2 (p. 20)

Lying , Thinking

“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.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Axis

Source: Axis (2007), Chapter 35 (p. 348)

Sense

““Wow,” Sue said. “You actually stole this?”
“We don’t use that word,” Elaine told her. “Chris has an unnamed high-level source.””

Robert Charles Wilson book Blind Lake

Source: Blind Lake (2003), Chapter 20 (p. 238)

“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.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Blind Lake

Source: Blind Lake (2003), Chapter 22 (p. 258)

Age , History , Learning , Science

“After a gaudy sunset that land became an immense, limitless darkness. Too large, Guilford thought, too empty, and too plain a token of the indifferent machinery of God.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Darwinia

Source: Darwinia (1998), Chapter 8 (p. 80)

God , Indifference

“His fertility cycles meant little to him. In his lifetime, he knew, he might make only one or two real contributions to the City’s genetic continuity, his viral gametes combining with others in the bodies of the night feeders to become morphologically active. It was abstractly pleasing, though, to realize he had cast his own essence into the ocean of probability, where it might come floating back unknown to him, as a fresh citizen with new and unique ideas and odors.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Blind Lake

Source: Blind Lake (2003), Chapter 33 (p. 358)

Idea , Night

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

Robert Charles Wilson book Blind Lake

Source: Blind Lake (2003), Chapter 15 (p. 179)