Robert Charles Wilson: Trending quotes (page 3)

“The problem was the Voxish prophecies. Our founders had written them into the Coryphaeus as unalterable axioms—embedded truths, permanently exempt from debate or revision. That hadn’t mattered when the rapture of the Hypotheticals was a distant goal toward which we moved in gradual increments. But now we had come to the blunt end of the question. Prophecy had collided with reality, and the obvious inference—that the prophecies might have been mistaken—was a possibility the Coryphaeus was forbidden to consider.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Vortex

Source: Vortex (2011), Chapter 22 (pp. 227-228)

Truth , Question , Problem , Reality

“The essence of life is change, he said, and the essence of eternal life is eternal change.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Darwinia

Source: Darwinia (1998), Chapter 25 (p. 209)

Life , Change

“The planet doesn’t hate you,” Theo had once said. “But its intimacies are fatal.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Bios

Source: Bios (1999), Chapter 4 (p. 43)

Hate

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

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

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

Parent

““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.”

Robert Charles Wilson

Pearl Baby (p. 211)
The Perseids and Other Stories (2000)

Secret , Way , Help

“What was time, after all, except a lead-footed march from the precincts of youth into the country of the grave? Time was the force that crumbled granite, devoured memory, and seduced infants into senility—as implacable as a hanging judge and as poetic as a tank.”

Robert Charles Wilson book A Bridge of Years

Source: A Bridge of Years (1991), Chapter 11 (p. 177)

Youth , Memory , Time , Country

“Bloody indeed,” the President said. “But we’re not a nation that flinches at blood, nor are we a people constrained by feminine delicacy. To us all is permitted—even cruelty, yes, even ruthlessness—for we’re the first in the world to raise the sword not in the name of enslaving and oppressing anyone, but in the name of freeing them from bondage. We must not be miserly with blood! Let there be blood, if blood alone can drown the old secular world. Let there be pain, and let there be death, if pain and death will save us from the twin tyrannies of Atheism and Europe.”

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

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), pp. 247-248 (spoken by the tyrannical president Deklan Comstock)

Death , Pain , People , World

“Zoe slowed but didn’t stop. She kept her hands in front of her, still a judicious distance from the animal.
But close enough to smell it. Close enough to see the steam rising from its warm underbelly into the night air. Four billion years of un-Earthly evolution had shaped this aggregate of cells, this beast. She looked at it. And, amazingly, it looked at her. An impossible distance from the planet of her birth, this miracle had happened: Clay had made life. Life regarded life. First light, Zoe thought.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Bios

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

Life , Birth , Light , Animals

“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.”

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

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), p. 217

Justice

“There were times when his life had seemed to him like one prolonged act of sleepwalking.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Memory Wire

Source: Memory Wire (1987), Chapter 16 (p. 142)

Life , Time

“He was not accustomed to thinking about these things so bluntly, but the facts were as obvious as they were painful.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Memory Wire

Source: Memory Wire (1987), Chapter 21 (p. 181)

Pain , Thinking

“There’s no forgiveness built into the system. I told Barbara so, dozens of times. She was always marching off to save the whales, save the trees, save some goddamn thing. It was endearing. But in the back of my head I always heard Dad’s voice: ‘This is only a holding action. Nothing is ever really saved.’ Barbara thought the greenhouse effect was like a virus, something you could stop if you came up with the right vaccine. I told her it was a cancer—the cancer of humanity on the vital organs of the earth. You can’t stop that by marching.”
“Isn’t that a little like giving up?”
“I think it’s called acceptance.”
Archer stood and walked to the door, where his silhouette obscured the motion of the trees.
“Very bleak attitude, Tom.”

Robert Charles Wilson book A Bridge of Years

“Experience bears it out.”
Source: A Bridge of Years (1991), Chapter 3 (pp. 52-53)

Forgiveness , Thinking , Tree , Time

“He was as alone as he had ever been, frighteningly alone, in a borderless land of shaded forests and rocky, abyssal gorges. But that was all right. He didn’t much mind being alone. It was what happened when people were around that worried him.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Darwinia

Source: Darwinia (1998), Chapter 24 (p. 195)

People

“The afternoon is too tempting to be denied. It isn’t Paradise here, or even close, but the mimosa is in bloom and the air from the sea is cool and pleasant. On days like this I think of poor old Magnus Stepney’s evolving Green God, harking us all up to Eden. The Green God’s voice is faint enough that few of us hear it clearly, and that’s our tragedy, I suppose, as a species—but I hear it very distinctly just now. It asks me to step into the sunshine, and I mean to do its bidding.”

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

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), p. 413 (closing words)

God , Thinking , Sea

““Ah, books.” Ziegler, smiling, came up behind me. “They bob like corks on an ocean. Float between worlds, messages in bottles.””

Robert Charles Wilson

Divided by Infinity (p. 179)
The Perseids and Other Stories (2000)

Books , World , Smile

“Nobody wants to conduct an autopsy on a dead saint.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Blind Lake

Source: Blind Lake (2003), Chapter 10 (p. 116)

Dead

“The world is what it is and won’t be bargained with.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Spin

Source: Spin (2005), p. 62

World

“Deacon Hollingshead: “The history of the world is written in Scripture, and it ends in a Kingdom.”
Julian Comstock: “The history of the world is written in sand, and it evolves as the wind blows.””

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

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), p. 404

World , History

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

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

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), p. 368

“We spent a lot of time discussing cosmology first. I think that was your father’s unique way of evaluating people. You can tell a lot about a person, he once said, by the way they look at the stars.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Axis

Source: Axis (2007), Chapter 19 (p. 235)

People , Way , Star , Thinking