Robert Charles Wilson Quotes

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

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.

Now as ever, he was startled by the wild exuberance of the twentieth century. All these lights! Colored neon and glaring filaments, powered, he had learned, but mechanical dams spanning rivers hundreds of miles away. And most of this—astonishingly—in the name of advertising.

Must be a full moon," she said."Lawrence is turning into an asshole.

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.

He was not accustomed to thinking about these things so bluntly, but the facts were as obvious as they were painful.

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.

For them, the idea of forgetting was indistinguishable from the idea of death. To pass out of memory was to pass out of the world. To conserve memory was to confer immortality.

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

There were times when his life had seemed to him like one prolonged act of sleepwalking.

He had come out of the war twice-decorated and with a thoughtful respect for the horrors of combat. He had seen terrible things, participated in terrible things...but that was the nature of war, and it was not something you could enter into halfway. War was a state of mind, war was all or nothing.

It was amazing how these events lost their impact, translated through the flat gaze of a video screen.

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

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

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.