Top 94 Robert Charles Wilson Quotes

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

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #8468
#2. Does it strike you, Mr. Keller, that we live every day in the science fiction of our youth?

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #32912
#3. It was amazing how these events lost their impact, translated through the flat gaze of a video screen.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #33945
#4. [There was] only one news channel, overseen by a bland and complexly multicultural board of advisors. It broadcast in fifteen languages and was, as a rule, interesting in none of them.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #34784
#5. We are as ephemeral as rain drops.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #42902
#6. Since Deacon Hollingshead's arrival in town last July the Dominion had been hard at work, cleansing New York City of moral corruption. "Corruption" is a popular word with the enthusiasts of the Dominion, usually uttered as a prelude to the knife, the docket, or the noose.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #53512
#7. This would have been less annoying had it been untrue.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #62400
#8. Some researchers had even concluded that the effort to understand the brain was necessarily doomed - that consciousness cannot comprehend consciousness any more than a box may contain itself. "This

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #75639
#9. It's partly the Southernization of America, in that the Southern working-class version of redneck is becoming the national version, and it's good-natured, it has humor and, in some ways, it's a performance.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #115666
#10. What had been released into the desert vacuum and starry oases of the galaxy was the inexorable logic of reproduction and natural selection. What followed was parasitism, predation, symbiosis, interdependency chaos, complexity, life.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #118301
#11. Goddamn you," Jacob said. "There's no damnation, Jacob. No Heaven but the forest and no God but the hive.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #129010
#12. Even a dry well may freshen.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #142971
#13. The view was in an unearthly way beautiful, but it was also unendurable. It implied too much

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #161334
#14. I wanted to sell tomorrow to the highest bidder and settle down forever in July second.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #219211
#15. Some pious men may find this truth unorthodox and bitter: But Nature, Chance, and Time ensure survival of the fitter!

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #232121
#16. I thought of Einstein, and his insistence that no particular point of view was more privileged than any other: in other words his 'general relativity', and its claim that the answer to the question 'What is real?" begins with the question 'Where are you standing?

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #281926
#17. There is a prejuidice imposed on us by our brief window of consciousness: things that move are alive, things that don't are dead.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #344746
#18. And death? I don't fear death. I dread the absence of it.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #353226
#19. The book was a pleasure to write, and I thought it both original and good, though what was original about it was not necessarily good, and what was good about it was not always original.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #353368
#20. There is something mournful and uneasy about waking up late at night on a moving train. The wheels clicked a bony rhythm, the engine growled like a distant Leviathan, and from time to time the whistle sounded a cry so lonesome it seemed to speak for the whole wide moonless night.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #357519
#21. I suppose the pursuit of fashion has always carried a price, monetary or otherwise.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #369090
#22. The rattle of plates and cutlery was the sound of empires falling.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #394080
#23. Here she was back in the brightly lit world she had been avoiding for twenty years, and it was exactly as awful as she remembered it.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #401404
#24. We spent a lot of time discussing cosmology first. I think that was your father's unique way of evaluating people. You can tell a lot about a person, he once said, by the way they look at the stars.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #410299
#25. I suppose every decade gets the music it deserves.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #415055
#26. Suddenly I wanted the earlier version back, but there was no retrieving it. When I blurred the lines to soften them it was as if she began to disappear.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #424020
#27. When does loyalty become martyrdom?

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #467554
#28. Then his expression softened, as if he had solved a troublesome riddle. He smiled. "You do it," he said. Then he stepped over the edge.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #482865
#29. 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.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #493789
#30. We're all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we're seldom formally introduced.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #572517
#31. John Scalzi is a fresh and appealing new voice, and Old Man's War is classic SF seen from a modern perspective - a fast-paced tour of a daunting, hostile universe.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #581304
#32. But physicians don't really save lives, of course, we prolong them;

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #581870
#33. Consciousness," according to current scientific thought, was something the higher mammals had evolved in order to help them reproduce, much the way a garden slug secretes slime. It had no special ontological status. The "self" was a genetically modulated and biologically useful illusion.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #587552
#34. 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.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #608100
#35. What is inevitable is not death but change. Change is the only abiding reality. The metaverse evolves, fractally and forever. Saints become sinners, sinners become saints. Dust becomes men, men become gods, gods become dust.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #654471
#36. Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #687295
#37. Ah, books." Ziegler, smiling, came up behind me. "They bob like corks on an ocean. Float between worlds, messages in bottles.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #736322
#38. There's no point living if you can't, at least occasionally, live.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #737832
#39. Amazing, I thought, how busily we had turned ourselves into people who didn't know one another very well.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #741273
#40. What a person runs from and what a person runs to aren't always as different as we hope.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #800975
#41. I believed there were no Hypotheticals in the sense of consciously acting agents conscious entities. There was only the process. The needles of evolution, endlessly knitting.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #807827
#42. Are you just a car salesman or are you a poet too?" "I've never been accused of poetry before.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #850356
#43. I was east of Skepticism and north of Faith, with an unsettled compass and variable winds. But I could offer up a prayer as well as the next man, and leave it to Heaven to judge the result.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #866888
#44. The water in the ocean is like the water in a swimming pool, but you can't swim across it.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #875619
#45. 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.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #877544
#46. But it was my first evidence that Diane lived in a world even bigger than the Big House, a world where grief and joy moved as ponderously as tides, with the weight of an ocean behind them.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #885605
#47. By definition, you can't experience your own death. Death is the end of consciousness. And consciousness persists. In the language of physics, consciousness is conserved.
I am the one who wakes up in the morning.
Always.
Every morning.
I don't die.
I just become increasingly unlikely.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #908799
#48. One doesn't have to understand in order to look. One has to look, in order to understand.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #925856
#49. There's no drug that'll make a stupid man smart.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #957061
#50. Stupid people do stupid things, but people who are smart enough can do something really stupid.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #963830
#51. Promises were like bad checks, easy to write and hard to cash.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #981001
#52. Smoke poured from every chimney, for the day was cold. The thought of all those coal-grates and wood-stoves made me wary of fire, for these buildings were little more than tinder and brown paper, putting on airs of architecture.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1007875
#53. If I am an agnostic, Calyxa, it's because I'm also a realist.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1022991
#54. I don't believe money is evil, but it can be terribly corrosive.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1023901
#55. [A]ll the ... people who visited me out of a sense of duty, who were relentlessly sympathetic and secretly indifferent.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1038972
#56. To capture the pawn, threaten the queen.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1149436
#57. It was the kind of experience, Molly said, that would grow calluses on an angel's ass.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1158745
#58. We're as ephemeral as raindrops. We all fall, and we all land somewhere.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1169697
#59. As for the charm and innocence I hoped to find -- it exists, it really does, but consider what it's buried in. Racism. Misogyny and homophobia so absolute as to be nearly universal. Hatred of the Irish, the Italians, the Chinese -- not that many of them are seen in these parts

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1206713
#60. The attacking piece displaces its victim. The vanquished piece leaves the plane of the board entirely. But it does not, in a higher sense, cease to exist.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1207914
#61. knowledge wasn't created but discovered;

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1218664
#62. Some things are taken away from you, some you leave behind and some you carry with you, world without end.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1219126
#63. Slept too long. And I don't much like the world I woke up to.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1221405
#64. Vanished children, I can't think where I lost them ...

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1237664
#65. Personally, I don't believe in anything more supernatural than what you read about in the Bible, and I only believe that one day out of seven.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1251070
#66. Do you want to tell the truth, or do you want to tell a story?

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1259555
#67. You must not make the mistake of thinking that because nothing lasts, nothing matters.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1313999
#68. 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 .

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1331112
#69. An honest book is almost as good as a friend.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1351126
#70. Fifteen minutes shy of two o'clock. The thick of the night. The zone of lost objectivity.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1378168
#71. I won't put my ignorance on an altar and call it God. It feels like idolatry, like the worst kind of idolatry.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1392326
#72. [H]e dreamed things for which he had no words.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1427635
#73. Evolution can't be predicted, Julian used to tell me; it's a scattershot business; it fires, but it doesn't aim.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1442590
#74. Gods, the pamphlets asserted, were not supernatural beings, but tenuously living things, like ethereal plants, that evolved in concert with the human species. We were simply their medium - our brains and flesh the soil in which they sprouted and grew.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1449331
#75. Children wear their natures like brightly-colored clothes; that's why they lie so transparently. Adulthood is the art of deceit.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1449615
#76. The universe, it seemed, was full to brimming with lonesome places.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1478193
#77. I would confront the thieves, I thought, and the self-evident justice of my case would cause them to crumble before me. I don't know why I expected such extravagant results from the application of mere justice. That kind of calculation is seldom borne out by worldly events.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1487701
#78. Ars moriendi ars vivendi est: the art of dying is the art of living.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1488590
#79. Sandra had studied psychiatry in order to understand the nature of despair, but all she had really learned was the pharmacology of it. The human mind was easier to medicate than to comprehend.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1505132
#80. Is there any evidence to the contrary? I don't need certainty in order to act on a well-founded suspicion.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1534343
#81. What we cannot remember, we must rediscover.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1545183
#82. We'll do what life always does defy expectations.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1555341
#83. Average people seldom talked about anything interesting and often hurt each other savagely.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1563770
#84. God, he asserted, was not contained in any Book, but was a Voice, which every human being could hear (and which most of us chose to ignore). The common name of that voice was Conscience; but it was a God by any reasonable definition, Stepney claimed.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1575454
#85. Nobody wants to conduct an autopsy on a dead saint.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1582554
#86. Mortality, a writer of my generation once said, trumps morality.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1603535
#87. But the world is what it is and won't be bargained with.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1617623
#88. You never stop being a parent, Adam, no matter how old or wise your child becomes you'll see.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1624249
#89. Words like anchors, tethering boats of memory that would otherwise be settled by the storm.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1720204
#90. 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.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1731459
#91. I understand so very little. But I am not afraid to look: I am a good observer at last. My eyes are open, and I am not afraid.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1818940
#92. The Mysteries are the Mysteries, and ultimately personal maybe the most personal thing in the universe. Evangelism, in my opinion, is a failure of the imagination. Beware of prophets: the best visions are the ones they leave in the desert.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1853697
#93. And the strange thing was that it felt absolutely familiar, the curve of her arm under my hand and the weight of her head against my shoulder: not discovered but remembered. She felt the way I had always known she would feel. Even the tang of her fear was familiar.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1865309
#94. You can't really comprehend events like that, I thought. You can only endure them.

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes #1875006

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