Robert Charles Wilson Quotes

A man who submits himself wholeheartedly to God might handle them and not be harmed. That was the faith my father had professed. Certainly he trusted God, in his own case, and believed God manifested Himself in the rolled eyes of his congregants and in their babble of incomprehensible tongues. Trust and be saved, was his philosophy. And yet in the end it was the snakes that killed him. I wondered which element of the calculation had ultimately failed him—human faith or divine patience.

The village muezzin called the faithful to prayer. Diane ignored the sound.

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.

So are they some form of life, or are they machines?"
"At the chemical level all living things can be construed as machines.

Is there any evidence to the contrary? I don’t need certainty in order to act on a well-founded suspicion.

I won’t put my ignorance on an altar and call it God.

It was the kind of experience, Molly said, that would grow calluses on an angel’s ass.

Zoe slowed but didn’t stop. She kept her hands in front of her, still a judicious distance from the animal.
But close enough to smell it. Close enough to see the steam rising from its warm underbelly into the night air. Four billion years of un-Earthly evolution had shaped this aggregate of cells, this beast. She looked at it. And, amazingly, it looked at her. An impossible distance from the planet of her birth, this miracle had happened: Clay had made life. Life regarded life. First light, Zoe thought.

The past was gone, the dead were dead and did not speak, and everybody dies; one day Oberg would be dead and silent, too, and that was as it should be: the broad and welcoming ocean of oblivion. It made life bearable. It was sacred. It should not be tampered with.

It was sad but completely understandable. Ten billion human beings without any cortical or limbic augmentation had simply acted to maximize their individual well-being. They hadn’t given much thought to long-term consequences, but how could they? They had no reliable mechanism by which they could think or act collectively. Blaming those people for the death of the ecosphere made as much sense as blaming water molecules for a tsunami.

A broken human being isn’t even a good tool.

This was unrecorded history, unhappening even as it happened.

The world is what it is and won’t be bargained with.

“You think Wexler is lying?”
“I think he’s fallible,” Byron had replied.