Robert Charles Wilson Quotes

The world is what it is and won’t be bargained with.

Along with a dozen other students I had dissected a human cadaver and sorted its contents by size, color, function, and weight. There was nothing pleasant about the experience. Its only consolation was its truth and its only virtue was its utility.

Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere.

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.

This would have been less annoying had it been untrue.

Understanding is better than ignorance. Ignorance, unlike life, unlike narrative, is static. Understanding implies a forward motion, thus the possibility of change.

We live in an enlightened age, however, an age that has learned to see and to value other living things as they are, not as we wish them to be. And the long and creditable history of science has taught us, if nothing else, to look carefully before we judge—to judge, if we must, based on what we see, not what we would prefer to believe.

His heart was in the right place. He wanted a religion that could plausibly comfort widows and orphans without committing them to patriarchy, intolerance, fundamentalism, or weird dietary laws. He wanted a religion that wasn’t in a perpetual fistfight with modern cosmology.

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

Promises were like bad checks, easy to write and hard to cash.

Nobody wants to conduct an autopsy on a dead saint.

If you understood the facts they needed no embroidery: all the wonder was already there, the more spellbinding because it was true.

Times like this, with the wind moving the grass and curling around her like a huge cool hand, Tess felt the world as a second presence, as another person, as if the wind and the grass had voices of their own and she could hear them talking.

I want them not to forget. Which is, I suppose, what all aged veterans want. But they’ll forget. Of course they will. And their children will know less of us than they do, and their children’s children will find us barely imaginable.
Which is as it should be. You can’t stop time.

It was possible at last to hear the silence—to appreciate that there was a silence, deep and potent, out there beyond the pretension of the light.