Robert Charles Wilson Quotes page 2

“I gather we’re not the most craven species in the galaxy, but we’re not the most angelic by a long shot.”

Prologue (pp. 10-11)
Darwinia (1998)

“There’s no drug that’ll make a stupid man smart.”

Source: Darwinia (1998), Chapter 25 (p. 211)

“Evolution can’t be predicted, Julian used to tell me; it’s a scattershot business; it fires, but it doesn’t aim.”

Source: Axis (2007), Chapter 6 (p. 81)

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

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), p. 57

“They allow us access to the experience of the past—the only kind of time machine we are ever likely to have.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Memory Wire

Source: Memory Wire (1987), Chapter 18 (p. 160)

“Perpetual peace is a dream,” he said, “as much as we may yearn for it—but war! War is an integral part of God’s ordering of the universe, without which the world would be swamped in selfishness and materialism. War is the very vessel of honor, and who of us could endure a world without the divine folly of honor? That faith is especially true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause he little understands, during a campaign of which he has little notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use. On the field of battle, where a man lives or dies by the caprice of a bullet or the verdict of a bayonet, life is at its best and healthiest.”

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

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), p. 246 (spoken by the tyrannical president Deklan Comstock)

“Times like this, with the wind moving the grass and curling around her like a huge cool hand, Tess felt the world as a second presence, as another person, as if the wind and the grass had voices of their own and she could hear them talking.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Blind Lake

Source: Blind Lake (2003), Chapter 2 (p. 23)

“It was possible at last to hear the silence—to appreciate that there was a silence, deep and potent, out there beyond the pretension of the light.”

“Ziegler said, “You know the story in the Bible, the story of Abraham and Isaac?”
“Of course.”
“God instructs Abraham to offer his son as a sacrifice. Isaac makes it as far as the chopping block before God changes his mind.”
Yes. Jacob had always imagined God a little appalled at Abraham’s willingness to cooperate.
Ziegler said, “What’s the moral of the story?”
“Faith.”
“Hardly,” Ziegler said. “Faith has nothing to do with it. Abraham never doubted the existence of God—how could he? The evidence was ample. His virtue wasn’t faith, it was fealty. He was so simplemindedly loyal that he would commit even this awful, terrible act. He was the perfect foot soldier. The ideal pawn. Abraham’s lesson: fealty is rewarded. Not morality. The fable makes morality contingent. Don’t go around killing innocent people, that is, unless you're absolutely certain God want you to. It’s a lunatic’s credo.
“Isaac, on the other hand, learns something much more interesting. He learns that neither God nor his own father can be trusted. Maybe it makes him a better man than Abraham. Suppose Isaac grows up and fathers a child of his own, and God approaches him and makes the same demand. One imagines Isaac saying, ’No. You can take him if you must, but I won’t slaughter my son for you.’ He’s not the good and faithful servant his father was. But he is, perhaps, a more wholesome human being.””

Source: The Chronoliths (2001), Chapter 23 (p. 272)

“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.”

The Fields of Abraham (pp. 21-22)
The Perseids and Other Stories (2000)

“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.”

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

Robert Charles Wilson book Bios

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

“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

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

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

Source: Spin (2005), p. 72

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

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

Robert Charles Wilson book A Bridge of Years

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

““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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

Robert Charles Wilson book Memory Wire

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

“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.”

“[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.”

Epilogue (p. 316)
Darwinia (1998)

“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.”

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

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

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

“Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere.”

Source: Spin (2005), p. 225

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

““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.””

“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.”

Source: Spin (2005), p. 128

Robert Charles Wilson book Vortex

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

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

“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.”

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

Robert Charles Wilson book A Bridge of Years

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

“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.”

“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.”

Epilogue (p. 318)
Darwinia (1998)

“To capture the pawn, threaten the queen.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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

““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.””

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Spin (2005), p. 451

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“Don’t despise life.”