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.

We’ll do what life always does—defy expectations.

Don’t be upset. The world is full of surprises. We’re all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we’re seldom formally introduced.

It never fails to astonish me," Carol said. "The tenacity of love.

His eyes were closed, shut tight on whatever battle his common sense was conducting with his faith.

“When was it obvious she was ill?”
“Weeks ago. Or maybe—looking back on it—well—months.”
“Has she had any kind of medical attention?” Pause. “Simon?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“It didn’t seem necessary.”
“It didn’t seem necessary?”
“Pastor Dan wouldn’t allow it.”
I thought: And did you tell Pastor Dan to go fuck himself?

All the brands and flavors of Big Salvation. At the last minute we would devise a technological fix and save ourselves. Or: the Hypotheticals were benevolent beings who would turn the planet into a peaceable kingdom. Or: God would rescue us all, or at least the true believers among us. Or. Or. Or. Big Salvation. It was a honeyed lie. A paper lifeboat, even if we were killing ourselves trying to cling to it. It wasn’t the Spin that had mutilated my generation. It was the lure and price of Big Salvation.

He rolled his eyes. “Those are things people say, Tyler. Talking about multilateralism and diplomacy is like saying ‘I love you’—it serves to facilitate the fucking.

An honest book is almost as good as a friend.

I loved Molly. Or at least I told myself I did. Or, if what I felt for her was not love, it was at least a plausible imitation, a convincing substitute.

I don’t believe money is evil, but it can be terribly corrosive.

It was the kind of experience, Molly said, that would grow calluses on an angel’s ass.

The suicidally disgruntled were legion, And their enemies included any and all Americans, Brits, Canadians, Danes, et cetera; or, conversely, all Moslems, dark-skinned people, non-English-speakers, immigrants; all Catholics, fundamentalists, atheists; all liberals, all conservatives...For such people the consummate act of moral clarity was a lynching or a suicide bombing, a fatwa or a pogrom. And they were ascendant now, rising like dark stars over a terminal landscape.

We might have destroyed ourselves, but at least it would have been our own fault."
"Would it, though? Whose fault exactly? Yours? Mine? No, it would have been the result of several billion human beings making relatively innocuous choices: to have kids, drive a car to work, keep their job, solve the short-term problems first. When you reach the point at which even the most trivial acts are punishable by the death of the species, then obviously, obviously, you're at a critical juncture, a different kind of point of no return.

He’s exactly what she wants. He’s the last thing she needs.