Robert Charles Wilson: Trending quotes (page 5)

“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, secrets beyond counting.”

Robert Charles Wilson

The Inner Inner City (p. 74)
The Perseids and Other Stories (2000)

Secret , Nature , Animals

“Here was the real horror, Degrandpre thought, this breaking of barriers. Civilization, after all, was the making of divisions, of walls and fences to parse the chaotic wild into ordered cells of human imagination. Wilderness invades the garden and reason is overthrown.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Bios

Source: Bios (1999), Chapter 19 (p. 164)

Imagination

“These movies belonged to the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—that period of great, unsustainable, and hedonistic prosperity, driven by the burning of Earth’s reserves of perishable oil, which culminated in the False Tribulation, and the wars, and the plagues, and the painful dwindling of inflated populations to more reasonable numbers.”

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

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), p. 29

Pain , War , Falseness

“He’s exactly what she wants. He’s the last thing she needs.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Spin

Source: Spin (2005), p. 72

“Fortune had done him few favors in the past, and he wasn’t sure he trusted it.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Axis

Source: Axis (2007), Chapter 7 (pp. 92-93)

Past

“Time is a vastness,” he said finally. “We tend to underestimate it.”

Robert Charles Wilson book A Bridge of Years

Source: A Bridge of Years (1991), Chapter 13 (p. 244)

Time

““But you're a Philosopher!” Julian exclaimed at one point. “This is Philosophy, not Religion, since you rule out supernatural beings—you know that as well as I do!”
“I suppose it is Philosophy, looked at from one angle,” Stepney conceded. “But there’s no money in Philosophy, Julian. Religion is far more lucrative as a career.””

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

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), p. 338

Money , Religion

“A lot of people have made political careers out of religious piety and the fear of foreigners, but that won’t last. Not enough foreigners or miracles to sustain the crisis.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Darwinia

Source: Darwinia (1998), Chapter 7 (p. 77)

People , Fear

“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.”

Robert Charles Wilson

The Fields of Abraham (p. 37)
The Perseids and Other Stories (2000)

Sense

“And death?
I don’t fear death.
I dread the absence of it.”

Robert Charles Wilson

Divided by Infinity (p. 195)
The Perseids and Other Stories (2000)

Death , Fear

““Maybe you were better off not knowing.”
“Ignorance is not bliss.””

Robert Charles Wilson book Darwinia

Source: Darwinia (1998), Chapter 29 (p. 245)

“For them, the idea of forgetting was indistinguishable from the idea of death. To pass out of memory was to pass out of the world. To conserve memory was to confer immortality.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Memory Wire

Source: Memory Wire (1987), Chapter 18 (p. 161)

Death , World , Idea , Memory

“Last week the doctor at the Tilson Rural Clinic had shown him his X-rays, the too-easy-to-interpret shadows on his liver and lungs. Guilford had declined an offer of surgery and and last-gasp radiation therapy. This horse was too old to beat.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Darwinia

Epilogue (p. 316)
Darwinia (1998)

Horse

“[There was] only one news channel, overseen by a bland and complexly multicultural board of advisors. It broadcast in fifteen languages and was, as a rule, interesting in none of them.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Axis

Source: Axis (2007), Chapter 4 (p. 40)

“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.”

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

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), p. 317

“Julian read the Bible as if it were a work of contemporary fiction, open to criticism or even revision. Once, when I queried him about the purpose of his unusual reinterpretations, he said to me, “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.””

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

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), pp. 126-127

Life , Wisdom , Pleasure , Knowledge

“I don’t believe money is evil, but it can be terribly corrosive.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Spin

Source: Spin (2005), p. 225

Money , Evil

“Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Spin

Source: Spin (2005), p. 1 (opening words)

“I want them not to forget. Which is, I suppose, what all aged veterans want. But they’ll forget. Of course they will. And their children will know less of us than they do, and their children’s children will find us barely imaginable.
Which is as it should be. You can’t stop time.”

Robert Charles Wilson book The Chronoliths

Source: The Chronoliths (2001), Chapter 28 (pp. 314-315)

Children , Age , Imagination , Time

“Do you want to tell the truth, or do you want to tell a story?”

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

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), p. 361

Truth