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
#2. Does it strike you, Mr. Keller, that we live every day in the science fiction of our youth?
Robert Charles Wilson
#3. It was amazing how these events lost their impact, translated through the flat gaze of a video screen.
Robert Charles Wilson
#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
#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
#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
#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
#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
#11. Goddamn you," Jacob said. "There's no damnation, Jacob. No Heaven but the forest and no God but the hive.
Robert Charles Wilson
#13. The view was in an unearthly way beautiful, but it was also unendurable. It implied too much
Robert Charles Wilson
#14. I wanted to sell tomorrow to the highest bidder and settle down forever in July second.
Robert Charles Wilson
#15. Some pious men may find this truth unorthodox and bitter: But Nature, Chance, and Time ensure survival of the fitter!
Robert Charles Wilson
#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
#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
#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
#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
#21. I suppose the pursuit of fashion has always carried a price, monetary or otherwise.
Robert Charles Wilson
#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
#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
#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
#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
#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
#30. We're all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we're seldom formally introduced.
Robert Charles Wilson
#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
#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
#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
#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
#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
#39. Amazing, I thought, how busily we had turned ourselves into people who didn't know one another very well.
Robert Charles Wilson
#40. What a person runs from and what a person runs to aren't always as different as we hope.
Robert Charles Wilson
#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
#42. Are you just a car salesman or are you a poet too?" "I've never been accused of poetry before.
Robert Charles Wilson
#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
#44. The water in the ocean is like the water in a swimming pool, but you can't swim across it.
Robert Charles Wilson
#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
#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
#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
#48. One doesn't have to understand in order to look. One has to look, in order to understand.
Robert Charles Wilson
#50. Stupid people do stupid things, but people who are smart enough can do something really stupid.
Robert Charles Wilson
#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
#55. [A]ll the ... people who visited me out of a sense of duty, who were relentlessly sympathetic and secretly indifferent.
Robert Charles Wilson
#57. It was the kind of experience, Molly said, that would grow calluses on an angel's ass.
Robert Charles Wilson
#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
#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
#62. Some things are taken away from you, some you leave behind and some you carry with you, world without end.
Robert Charles Wilson
#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
#67. You must not make the mistake of thinking that because nothing lasts, nothing matters.
Robert Charles Wilson
#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
#70. Fifteen minutes shy of two o'clock. The thick of the night. The zone of lost objectivity.
Robert Charles Wilson
#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
#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
#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
#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
#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
#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
#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
#83. Average people seldom talked about anything interesting and often hurt each other savagely.
Robert Charles Wilson
#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
#88. You never stop being a parent, Adam, no matter how old or wise your child becomes you'll see.
Robert Charles Wilson
#89. Words like anchors, tethering boats of memory that would otherwise be settled by the storm.
Robert Charles Wilson
#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
#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
#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
#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
#94. You can't really comprehend events like that, I thought. You can only endure them.
Robert Charles Wilson
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