Robert Charles Wilson: Trending quotes (page 2)

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

Robert Charles Wilson book Memory Wire

Source: Memory Wire (1987), Chapter 4 (p. 33)

“He had come out of the war twice-decorated and with a thoughtful respect for the horrors of combat. He had seen terrible things, participated in terrible things…but that was the nature of war, and it was not something you could enter into halfway. War was a state of mind, war was all or nothing.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Memory Wire

Source: Memory Wire (1987), Chapter 15 (p. 134)

War , Nature

“It never fails to astonish me,” Carol said. “The tenacity of love.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Spin

Source: Spin (2005), p. 403

Love

“An honest book is almost as good as a friend.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Spin

Source: Spin (2005), p. 261

Books

“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.”

Robert Charles Wilson

Afterword (p. 220)
The Perseids and Other Stories (2000)

Imagination , Failure , Universe , Personality

“When does loyalty become martyrdom?”

Robert Charles Wilson book The Chronoliths

Source: The Chronoliths (2001), Chapter 19 (p. 240)

Loyalty

“Personally, I don’t believe in anything more supernatural than what you read about in the Bible, and I only believe that one day out of seven.”

Robert Charles Wilson book The Chronoliths

Source: The Chronoliths (2001), Chapter 8 (p. 112)

Reading , Personality

“A man who submits himself wholeheartedly to God might handle them and not be harmed. That was the faith my father had professed. Certainly he trusted God, in his own case, and believed God manifested Himself in the rolled eyes of his congregants and in their babble of incomprehensible tongues. Trust and be saved, was his philosophy. And yet in the end it was the snakes that killed him. I wondered which element of the calculation had ultimately failed him—human faith or divine patience.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), pp. 355-356

God , Faith , Patience

“If I am an agnostic, Calyxa, it’s because I'm also a realist.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), p. 216

“Must be a full moon,” she said.”Lawrence is turning into an asshole.”

Robert Charles Wilson book A Bridge of Years

Source: A Bridge of Years (1991), Chapter 8 (p. 143)

“His eyes were closed, shut tight on whatever battle his common sense was conducting with his faith.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Spin

Source: Spin (2005), p. 377

Faith , Sense

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

Robert Charles Wilson book The Chronoliths

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

Children , Lie , Art , Color

“The village muezzin called the faithful to prayer. Diane ignored the sound.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Axis

Source: Axis (2007), Chapter 11 (p. 149)

Faith

“Does it strike you, Mr. Keller, that we live every day in the science fiction of our youth?”

Robert Charles Wilson

Divided by Infinity (p. 172)
The Perseids and Other Stories (2000)

Youth , Science

“If you understood the facts they needed no embroidery: all the wonder was already there, the more spellbinding because it was true.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Blind Lake

Source: Blind Lake (2003), Chapter 7 (p. 69)

“Truth is a perilous commodity,” Julian admitted, “but so is ignorance, Adam—more so.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), p. 200

Truth

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

Robert Charles Wilson book Vortex

Source: Vortex (2011), Chapter 2 (p. 31)

World

“What we cannot remember, we must rediscover.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Axis

Source: Axis (2007), Chapter 7 (p. 100; repeated on p. 355 at the end of the book)

“His heart was in the right place. He wanted a religion that could plausibly comfort widows and orphans without committing them to patriarchy, intolerance, fundamentalism, or weird dietary laws. He wanted a religion that wasn’t in a perpetual fistfight with modern cosmology.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Blind Lake

Source: Blind Lake (2003), Chapter 22 (p. 255)

Religion , Law , Heart

“From this new point of view, the universe I had inhabited became an object I could perceive in its entirety. It was a hypersphere embedded in a cloud of alternative states—the sum of all possible quantum trajectories from the big bang to the decay of matter. “Reality”—history as we had known or inferred it—was only the most likely of these possible trajectories. There were countless others, real in a different sense: a vast but finite set of paths not taken, a ghostly forest of quantum alternatives, the shores of an unknown sea.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Vortex

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

History , Reality , Sense , Universe