Robert Charles Wilson Quotes

Baumgartner's coke habit isn't the secret she thinks it is, and it gives us leverage."
"Coke?"
"Coke, yeah, you know: cocaine. When she powders her nose, she literally powders her nose.

His sympathy (that is, for a caterpillar parasitized by a wasp) was an anthropomorphism, a projection. The caterpillar was hardly more than a protein engine enacting a suite of encoded behaviors. A meat robot. As am I, except that in the case of Ethan’s species evolution had conjured a knowing self out of chemistry and contingency. I feel, therefore I abhor.

Violence is the great attractor of human history, Dr. Iverson. A force almost as irresistible as gravity.

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

“Consciousness,” according to current scientific thought, was something the higher mammals had evolved in order to help them reproduce, much the way a garden slug secretes slime. It had no special ontological status. The “self” was a genetically modulated and biologically useful illusion.

I suppose he could have said this more gently, but what would be the point?

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.

From this new point of view, the universe I had inhabited became an object I could perceive in its entirety. It was a hypersphere embedded in a cloud of alternative states—the sum of all possible quantum trajectories from the big bang to the decay of matter. “Reality”—history as we had known or inferred it—was only the most likely of these possible trajectories. There were countless others, real in a different sense: a vast but finite set of paths not taken, a ghostly forest of quantum alternatives, the shores of an unknown sea.

Strange, isn’t it, how people cling most desperately to a thing when it becomes least useful to them?

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

There’s no point living if you can’t, at least occasionally, live.

Life shites on hope.

I loved Molly. Or at least I told myself I did. Or, if what I felt for her was not love, it was at least a plausible imitation, a convincing substitute.

The most fundamental parental urge is the urge to nurture and protect. To grieve for a child is to admit ultimate impotence. You can’t protect what goes into the ground. You can’t tuck a blanket around a grave.

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