Robert Charles Wilson: Quotes about time

“She understood too much. She understood that she had reached her destiny point, that time and the circumstances of her life had conspired to bring her to this place. For one ecstatic moment she was the axis on which the stars revolved.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Bios

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

Life , Star , Time

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Sandra had spent her days rendering pass/fail verdicts over troubled minds, applying tests most functional adults easily passed. Is the subject oriented to time and place? Does the subject understand the consequences of his actions? But if she could give the same test to humanity as a whole, Sandra thought, the outcome would be very much in doubt. Subject is confused and often self-destructive. Subject pursues short-term gratification at the expense of his own well-being.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Vortex

Source: Vortex (2011), Chapter 1 (p. 16)

Understanding , Time

“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)

Time , Past

“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)

World , Grass , Time , Personality

“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

“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

“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

“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