Robert Charles Wilson: Trending quotes (page 6)

““We might have destroyed ourselves, but at least it would have been our own fault.”
“Would it, though? Whose fault exactly? Yours? Mine? No, it would have been the result of several billion human beings making relatively innocuous choices: to have kids, drive a car to work, keep their job, solve the short-term problems first. When you reach the point at which even the most trivial acts are punishable by the death of the species, then obviously, obviously, you’re at a critical juncture, a different kind of point of no return.””

Robert Charles Wilson book Spin

Source: Spin (2005), p. 128

Death , Cars , Problem

“What had been released into the desert vacuum and starry oases of the galaxy was the inexorable logic of reproduction and natural selection. What followed was parasitism, predation, symbiosis, interdependency—chaos, complexity, life.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Vortex

Source: Vortex (2011), Chapter 32 (p. 304)

Life , Nature

“I suppose every decade gets the music it deserves.”

Robert Charles Wilson book The Chronoliths

Source: The Chronoliths (2001), Chapter 14 (p. 175)

Music

“Now as ever, he was startled by the wild exuberance of the twentieth century. All these lights! Colored neon and glaring filaments, powered, he had learned, but mechanical dams spanning rivers hundreds of miles away. And most of this—astonishingly—in the name of advertising.”

Robert Charles Wilson book A Bridge of Years

Source: A Bridge of Years (1991), Chapter 9 (p. 148)

Color , Light , Learning

“To whom had he retailed his conscience, Sandra wondered, and what was the going price these days?”

Robert Charles Wilson book Vortex

Source: Vortex (2011), Chapter 9 (p. 118)

“He hated the idea of eulogizing himself. Some tasks are best left to others, surely including obituaries.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Darwinia

Epilogue (p. 318)
Darwinia (1998)

Hate , Idea

“Try to imagine that Minkowski cube, Ray said, as a block of liquid water freezing (as contrary as this seems) from the bottom up. The progression of the freeze represents at least our human experience of the march of time. What is frozen is past, immutable, changeless. What is liquid is future, indeterminate, uncertain. We live on the crystallizing boundary.”

Robert Charles Wilson book The Chronoliths

Source: The Chronoliths (2001), Chapter 9 (pp. 114-115)

Imagination , Water , Time , Past

“To capture the pawn, threaten the queen.”

Robert Charles Wilson

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

“To fire a bullet into the heart or brains of one’s fellow man—even a fellow man striving to do the same to you—creates what might be called an unassimilable memory: a memory that floats on daily life the way an oil stain floats on rainwater. Stir the rain barrel, scatter the oil into countless drops, disperse it all you like, but it will not mix; and eventually the slick comes back, as loathsomely intact as it ever was.”

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

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), pp. 110-111

Life , Way , Memory , Heart

“You must not make the mistake of thinking that because nothing lasts, nothing matters.”

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

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), p. 35

Thinking

“Some pious men may find this truth unorthodox and bitter:
But Nature, Chance, and Time ensure survival of the fitter!”

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

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), p. 389

Men , Truth , Nature , Chance

“Later Julian would give me another book he had culled from among the Archival duplicates, a short novel called The Time Machine by Mr. H. G. Wells, about a marvelous but apparently imaginary cart which carried a man into the future—and it fascinated me—but the Archive itself was a Time Machine in everything but name. Here were voices preserved on browning paper like pressed flowers, whispering apostasies into the ear of a new century.”

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

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), p. 332

Books , Flowers , Time , Future

““You learning anything from this?” Tyrell asked.
Turk stood up and brushed his hands. “Yeah. I'm learning that I know even less than I thought I did.””

Robert Charles Wilson book Axis

Source: Axis (2007), Chapter 3 (p. 36)

Learning

“Kait was immediately bored. Children Kaitlin’s age possess no context; one video event is much like another.”

Robert Charles Wilson book The Chronoliths

Source: The Chronoliths (2001), Chapter 3 (p. 32)

Children , Age

“We’ll do what life always does—defy expectations.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Spin

Source: Spin (2005), p. 451

Life

“Sometimes he wears the crown,” Magnus Stepney once remarked, “and sometimes, by the grace of God, he takes the damned thing off.”

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

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), p. 377

God

“Average people seldom talked about anything interesting and often hurt each other savagely.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Axis

Source: Axis (2007), Chapter 8 (p. 107)

People , Hurt

“But really, who do you think we’re working for? Not some Sunday school god, not the proverbial loving shepherd. The shoving leopard, more like.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Darwinia

Source: Darwinia (1998), Chapter 20 (p. 174)

Love , God , School , Thinking

“The rooms were confining, the windows minuscule, the ceilings perilously low. She could not have spent much money on the furnishings, which were shabby, threadbare, nicked, and splintered—I had seen better furniture abandoned at Montreal curbsides.
But if her book-cases were humble, they were bowed under the weight of surprisingly many books—almost as many as there had been in the library of the Duncan and Crowley Estate back in Williams Ford. It seemed to me a treasure more estimable than any fine sofa or plush footstool, and worth all the rough economies surrounding it.”

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

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), pp. 146-147

Money , Books

“Don’t despise life.”

Robert Charles Wilson

Divided by Infinity (p. 173)
The Perseids and Other Stories (2000)

Life