Robert Charles Wilson Quotes

You learning anything from this?" Tyrell asked.
Turk stood up and brushed his hands. "Yeah. I'm learning that I know even less than I thought I did.

His fertility cycles meant little to him. In his lifetime, he knew, he might make only one or two real contributions to the City’s genetic continuity, his viral gametes combining with others in the bodies of the night feeders to become morphologically active. It was abstractly pleasing, though, to realize he had cast his own essence into the ocean of probability, where it might come floating back unknown to him, as a fresh citizen with new and unique ideas and odors.

Sometimes the conscience makes demands that are non-negotiable. Courage has nothing to do with it. We weren’t here because we were brave. We were here because we had to be here.

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.

That worries me. One death is attrition; two would look like incompetence—on someone’s part.

What was time, after all, except a lead-footed march from the precincts of youth into the country of the grave? Time was the force that crumbled granite, devoured memory, and seduced infants into senility—as implacable as a hanging judge and as poetic as a tank.

Ris, it can’t tell the truth—it can’t distinguish between truth and lies. You know that. It uses words to manipulate people.

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

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.

There's no forgiveness built into the system. I told Barbara so, dozens of times. She was always marching off to save the whales, save the trees, save some goddamn thing. It was endearing. But in the back of my head I always heard Dad's voice: 'This is only a holding action. Nothing is ever really saved.' Barbara thought the greenhouse effect was like a virus, something you could stop if you came up with the right vaccine. I told her it was a cancer—the cancer of humanity on the vital organs of the earth. You can't stop that by marching."
"Isn't that a little like giving up?"
"I think it's called acceptance." Archer stood and walked to the door, where his silhouette obscured the motion of the trees.
"Very bleak attitude, Tom."
"Experience bears it out.

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

Time is a vastness," he said finally. "We tend to underestimate it.

Average people seldom talked about anything interesting and often hurt each other savagely.

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.”

The afternoon is too tempting to be denied. It isn’t Paradise here, or even close, but the mimosa is in bloom and the air from the sea is cool and pleasant. On days like this I think of poor old Magnus Stepney’s evolving Green God, harking us all up to Eden. The Green God’s voice is faint enough that few of us hear it clearly, and that’s our tragedy, I suppose, as a species—but I hear it very distinctly just now. It asks me to step into the sunshine, and I mean to do its bidding.