Robert Charles Wilson Quotes

The only reason you can’t see how crazy this is is because we’ve been neck-deep in crazy for years.

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.

There were times when his life had seemed to him like one prolonged act of sleepwalking.

What are you saying, you think he's completely sane?"
"No. But I'm not sure any of us rises to that standard.

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.

If I am an agnostic, Calyxa, it’s because I'm also a realist.

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.”

“When was it obvious she was ill?”
“Weeks ago. Or maybe—looking back on it—well—months.”
“Has she had any kind of medical attention?” Pause. “Simon?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“It didn’t seem necessary.”
“It didn’t seem necessary?”
“Pastor Dan wouldn’t allow it.”
I thought: And did you tell Pastor Dan to go fuck himself?

The planet doesn't hate you," Theo had once said. "But its intimacies are fatal.

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

I would confront the thieves, I thought, and the self-evident justice of my case would cause them to crumble before me. I don't know why I expected such extravagant results from the application of mere justice. That kind of calculation is seldom borne out by worldly events.

To capture the pawn, threaten the queen.

Ecstasy hates company.

I understand so very little. But I am not afraid to look: I am a good observer at last. My eyes are open, and I am not afraid.

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.