Robert Charles Wilson Quotes

But you're a Philosopher!" Julian exclaimed at one point. "This is Philosophy, not Religion, since you rule out supernatural beings—you know that as well as I do!"
"I suppose it is Philosophy, looked at from one angle," Stepney conceded. "But there's no money in Philosophy, Julian. Religion is far more lucrative as a career.

Maybe you were better off not knowing."
"Ignorance is not bliss.

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

Cassie had seen pictures in textbooks, of ranks of men in brown uniforms with rifles slung over their shoulders: the Allied Expeditionary Force, off to join the battered Brits and French. And pictures of the muddy European trenches: Ypres, Passchendaele, the Marne, where countless young men had been slaughtered by other young men as bewildered and obedient as themselves.

What we cannot remember, we must rediscover.

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

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.

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

We live in an enlightened age, however, an age that has learned to see and to value other living things as they are, not as we wish them to be. And the long and creditable history of science has taught us, if nothing else, to look carefully before we judge—to judge, if we must, based on what we see, not what we would prefer to believe.

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.

If you understood the facts they needed no embroidery: all the wonder was already there, the more spellbinding because it was true.

And the question she found herself asking now that Leo was asleep beside her was: had she fallen in love?
Because that was how it felt. But only a few minutes ago her body had exploded into an orgasm so intense that it probably registered on the Richter scale, so maybe her judgment wasn’t entirely unbiased.

“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.

All the pious high-school bullshit about the Century of Peace had been revealed for what it was: as artificial as a plastic nativity scene and as hollow as a split piñata. The world was peaceful the way a drunken coed passed out at a frat party was peaceful: it was the peace that facilitated the fucking.

Lada saw me as a diamond-in-the-rough, begging for her lapidary attention. While I saw her as an ultimately inscrutable amalgam of love, sex, and money.
It worked out about as well as you’d expect.