Robert Charles Wilson Quotes

Perfect aristocratic tone, Degrandpre thought: insult and menace in a single phrase.

Thus it was not money but conscience that had propelled me on this journey. Conscience, that crabbed and ecclesiastical nag, which inevitably spoke, whether I heeded it or not, in a voice much like my mother’s.

The awful thing about lying was that it became a habit, then a reflex, as automatic as the blinking of the eyes or the voiding of the bowels. Lying was the Terrestrial disease, his mother used to say.

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

Children wear their natures like brightly-colored clothes; that’s why they lie so transparently. Adulthood is the art of deceit.

He hated the idea of eulogizing himself. Some tasks are best left to others, surely including obituaries.

You must not make the mistake of thinking that because nothing lasts, nothing matters.

One doesn’t have to understand in order to look. One has to look, in order to understand.

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.

I believed there were no Hypotheticals in the sense of consciously acting agents—conscious entities. There was only the process. The needles of evolution, endlessly knitting.

I gather we’re not the most craven species in the galaxy, but we’re not the most angelic by a long shot.

Here was the real horror, Degrandpre thought, this breaking of barriers. Civilization, after all, was the making of divisions, of walls and fences to parse the chaotic wild into ordered cells of human imagination. Wilderness invades the garden and reason is overthrown.

I suppose the pursuit of fashion has always carried a price, monetary or otherwise.

You never stop being a parent, Adam, no matter how old or wise your child becomes—you'll see.

Wow," Sue said. "You actually stole this?"
"We don't use that word," Elaine told her. "Chris has an unnamed high-level source.