Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes

“You just don’t have faith!” Frank repeated.
”Well I hope I never get it! It’s like being hit by a hammer in the head!”

And the mind-body connection was so strong—so strong that the distinction itself was probably false, a vestige of Cartesian metaphysics or earlier religious views of the soul. Mind was one body’s life. Memory was mind. And so, by a simple transitive equation, memory equaled life. So that with memory gone, life was gone.

Every generation is its own secret society.

Sex, sex, there was nothing like sex, except for flying, which it much resembled: the rapture of the body, yet another echo of the Big Bang, that first orgasm.

Most ignorance is by choice, you know, and so ignorance is very telling about what really matters to people.

The way language came to children was incredible. They were all geniuses at that age, it took adults years and years to twist them down into the bonsai creatures they eventually became. Whou would dare to do that, who would dare deform this natural child? No one; and yet it got done. No one did it and everyone did it.

...there’s all kinds of phantom work! Unreal values assigned to most of the jobs on Earth! The entire transnational executive class does nothing a computer couldn’t do, and there are whole categories of parasitical jobs that add nothing to the system by an ecologic accounting. Advertising, stock brokerage, the whole apparatus for making money only from the manipulation of money—that is not only wasteful but corrupting, as all meaningful money values get distorted in such manipulation.” She waved a hand in disgust.

They were so ignorant! Young men and women, educated very carefully to be apolitical, to be technicians who thought they disliked politics, making them putty in the hands of their rulers, just like always. It was appalling how stupid they were, really, and he could not help lashing into them.

“Yeah yeah. We’d better call a meeting then,” Peter said, looking as annoyed at her as she felt at him.
“Yeah yeah,” Ann said heavily. Meetings. But they had their uses; people could assume they meant something, while the real work went on elsewhere.

There was orderly behavior, there was chaotic behavior; and on their border, in their interplay, so to speak, lay a very large and convoluted zone, the realm of the complex.

We all have seven secret lives. The life of excretion; the world of inappropriate sexual fantasies; our real hopes; our terror of death; our experience of shame; the world of pain; and our dreams. No one ever knows these lives. Consciousness is solitary. Each person lives in that bubble universe that rests under the skull, alone.

Waves striking the sea cliffs bounced back outward, creating interference patterns with the incoming waves that could have come right out of a physics wave tank: so beautiful. And so strange, that the world should conform so well to mathematical formulation. The unreasonable effectiveness of math; it was at the heart of the great unexplainable.

“It’s the same old story,” he said bitterly. “The resistance begins fighting itself, because that’s the only thing it can beat. Happens every time. You can’t get any movement larger than five people without including at least one fucking idiot.”

The weakness of businessmen was their belief that money was the point of the game; they worked 14-hour days in order to earn enough of it to buy cars with leather interiors, they thought it was a sensible recreation to play around with it in casinos—idiots, in short. But useful idiots.

In the next meeting they were arguing about the limits to tolerance, the things that simply wouldn’t be allowed no matter what religious meaning anyone gave them, and someone shouted, “Tell that to the Muslims!”