Robin Sloan Quotes

I will admit that I just want an excuse to put all my favorite people in a room together.

People want things to be real. If you give them an excuse, they'll believe you.

All the secrets of the world worth knowing are hiding in plain sight.

...this is exactly the kind of store that makes you want to buy a book about a teenage wizard. This is the kind of store that makes you want to be a teenage wizard.

“We believe that when this secret is finally unlocked, every member of the Unbroken Spine who ever lived...will live again.”
A Messiah, a first disciple, and a rapture. Check, check, and double-check. Penumbra is, right now, teetering right on the boundary between charmingly weird old guy and disturbingly weird old guy. Two things tip the scales toward charm: First, his wry smile, which is not the smile of the disturbed, and micromuscles don’t lie. Second, the look in Kat’s eyes. She’s enthralled. I guess people believe weirder things than this, right? Presidents and popes believe weirder things than this.

I was drunk and tired and happy. More than happy: delighted. Proud of myself — not just for making the bread, but for sharing it, and for making a few friends, even if they were all programmers and Loises. Maybe programmers and Loises are all you need.

Hello, nice to meet you, I sell unreadable books to weird old people - want to get dinner?

The internet: always proving that you're not quite as special as you suspected.

In your message, you told me about your family, how you don’t have any traditions. The first time I read that, it made me sad, but then I thought about it for a while and started to feel jealous. Lois, think about it! No one cares if your restaurant has tables. You can build robots, or bake bread, or do something else entirely. You’re unencumbered by culture. You’re... light!

I’ve never listened to an audiobook before, and I have to say, it’s a totally different experience. When you read a book, the story definitely happens inside your head. When you listen, it seems to happen in a little cloud all around it, like a fuzzy knit cap pulled down over your eyes:

On both sides, they've failed us...of course, we know about the industrialists. Their corn syrup and cheese product. Their factory farms ringed by rivers of blood and shit, blazing bonfires of disease barely contained by antibiotic blankets. These are among the most disgusting scenes in the history of this planet...

But on the other side...the organic farms, the precious restaurants...these are toy supply chains. 'Farm to table,' they say. Well. When you go from farm to table, you leave a lot of people out...I think more poorly of these people than I do of the industrialists, because they know better. They know it's all broken, and what do they do? They plant vegetables in the backyard.

When I was a kid reading fantasy novels, I daydreamed about hot girl wizards. I never thought I'd actually meet one, but that's only because I didn't realize wizards were going to walk among us and we'd just call them Googlers.

The suburban mind cannot comprehend the emergent complexity of a New York sidewalk.

There had to be a scale somewhere — the scale of stars, the scale of far-off cosmic super-beings — upon which we ourselves, we humans with our cities and bridges and subterranean markets, would look like the lactobacilli and the yeast.

Kat gushes about Google's projects, all revealed to her now. They are making a 3-D web browser. They are making a car that drives itself. They are making a sushi search engine — here she pokes a chopstick down at our dinner — to help people find fish that is sustainable and mercury-free. They are building a time machine. They are developing a form of renewable energy that runs on hubris.