Top 15 Robert Charles Wilson Quotes

It's complicated, Jesse. There's the official story. There's the real story. And there's the conspiracy theory."
"Tell me the real story."
"I would, but I don't know what it is."
"Well, then what's the official story? And who declared it official?

Not all idealism is fake.

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.

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

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.

What is intelligence, exactly? Maybe that sounds like a simple question. We know—or think we know—what our own kind of intelligence is like. After all, we experience it on a daily basis.
But there are other kinds of intelligence. There is the intelligence of the hive—the complex behavior that arises from individually unintelligent organisms following a few simple behavioral rules in response to cues from the environment. And there is a kind of intelligence that inheres in the ecosystem as a whole. Evolution, over time, has created entities as diverse as crinoids and mushrooms and harbor seals and howler monkeys, all without a predetermined goal and without devoting even a moment of thought to the subject. You might even conclude that this kind of thoughtless intelligence is more powerful and patient than our own.

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.

“Even if you could talk to it, you wouldn’t learn anything. All it would tell you is what it wanted you to hear. Or no, not even what it wants you to hear; it would generate words that in some kind of model of possible outcomes produce a result that enhances the likelihood of its reproductive success.”
“I do that too,” Leo said. “From time to time.” Smiling.
“Smartass,” Cassie said.

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

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.

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

So are they some form of life, or are they machines?"
"At the chemical level all living things can be construed as machines.

So we can trust each other."
"It's the rest of the world we can't be sure about.

Life shites on hope.

Reproduction, Nerissa thought: Ethan had once called it the blade of evolution. There was no intelligence in evolution, only the cutting-board logic of selective reproduction. She envisioned the work of evolution as a kind of blind, inarticulate poetry. We are the was it Charles Darwin had said? From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved…There is grandeur in this view of life.
Grandeur or horror. The idea that all the kaleidoscopic strangeness of biological systems could unfold without guidance or motivation was almost too unsettling to accept.