Robin Sloan Quotes

#1. I'm really starting to think the whole world is just a patchwork quilt of crazy little cults, all with their own secret spaces, their own records, their own rules. On

Robin Sloan

#2. We were looking at the sequence, not the shape.

Robin Sloan

#3. Maybe his big build isn't a linebacker's after all; maybe it's a librarian's.

Robin Sloan

#4. I tell him, and I write it down as I go. It makes me feel better, as if the weirdness is flowing out of my blood and onto the page, through the dark point of the pen

Robin Sloan

#5. It was tall, made of pale blue light, a creature with long arms and long legs and the shadow of a smile, and above it all, eyes that shone bluer still than its body. "What do you seek in this place?" the shade asked plainly.

Robin Sloan

#6. Some of them are working hard indeed."
"What are they doing?"
"My boy!" he said, eyebrows raised. As if nothing could be more obvious: "They are reading.

Robin Sloan

#7. At first I thought I had a crush on her, but then I realized she's an android.

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#8. I see it now. You cheated - would that be fair to say? And as a result, you have no idea what you have accomplished.

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#9. Once told, stories take on a life of their own.

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#10. But, of course, the point of a programming language is that you don't just read it; you write it, too. You make it do things for you. And this, I think, is where Ruby shines ( ... )

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#11. Penumbra's cult runs on egregious licensing fees

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#12. Its circumference was tiny, but he had a life, and he would not give it up.

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#13. Google," he breathes. There's a long pause. "How curious." He straightens. He has the strangest expression on his face - the emotive equivalent of 404 PAGE NOT FOUND.

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#14. Penumbra [...] produces another e-reader - it's a Nook. Then another one, a Sony. Another one, marked KOBO. Really? Who has a Kobo?

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#15. Have they all bought Kindles? I have one, and I use it most nights. I always imagine the books staring and whispering, Traitor! - but come on, I have a lot of free first chapters to get through.

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#16. Books of silver; books of bone; and yet the strangest thing you see in all your years at Galvanic is a boy in a ski-mask, sitting in a basement, using a computer.

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#17. Don't forget your ruler on your first day of cult!

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#18. Kat is sitting cross-legged on the floor in her underwear and red T-shirt, leaning in to her laptop. I'm on the lip of the bed above her with my Kindle drawing power from her USB port - um, not a euphemism - reading "The Dragon-Song Chronicles" for the fourth time.

Robin Sloan

#19. Your life must be an open city, with all sorts of ways to wander in.

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#20. Magic is not the only power in this world.

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#21. She's wearing the same red and yellow BAM! T-shirt from before, which means (a) she slept in, (b) she owns several identical T-shirts, or (c) she's a cartoon character - all of which are appealing alternatives.

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#22. I'm making progress of my own: Kat invites me to a house party. Unfortunately, I can't go. I can never go to any parties, because my shift starts at precisely party o'clock.

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#23. Of course, of course. Drugs, music, a new age dawning ... and you came for an old book.

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#24. I didn't realize wizards were going to walk among us and we'd just call them Googlers.

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#25. Neel takes a sharp breath and I know exactly what it means. It means: I have waited my whole life to walk through a secret passage built into a bookshelf.

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#26. America pays defense contractors to build aircraft carriers. Google pays brilliant programmers to do whatever the hell they want.

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#27. I loved The Chronicles of Narnia. I loved The Chronicles of Prydain. Basically, 'Chronicles of' - I was in!

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#28. I can't just sit at my desk and let this web of weirdness spin around me. (That describes a lot of jobs, I realize, but this is potentially a special kind of magick-with-a-k weirdness.

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#29. I sit up straight and do the first thing a person is supposed to do in an emergency, which is send a text message.

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#30. Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines
it's hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.

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#31. Oh, I am very familiar with the internal monologue.

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#32. My name is Clay Jannon and those were the days when I rarely touched paper.

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#33. Hadoop! I love the sound of it. Kat Potente, you and I will have a son, and we will name him Hadoop, and he will be a great warrior, a king!

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#34. We all come to life and gather allies and build empires and die, all in a single moment.

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#35. Why does the typical adventuring group consist of a wizard, a warrior, and a rogue, anyway? It should really be a wizard, a warrior, and a rich guy. Otherwise who's going to pay for all the swords and spells and hotel rooms?

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#36. Stuff that used to be hard just isn't hard anymore!

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#37. I sip something called the Blue Screen of Death, which is in fact neon-blue, with a bright LED winking inside one of the ice cubes.

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#38. The Golden Horn of Griffo is finely wrought," Zenodotus said, tracing his finger along the curve of Telemach's treasure. "And the magic is in its making alone. Do you understand? There is no sorcery here - none that I can detect.

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#39. This is Mat's secret weapon, his passport, his get-out-of-jail-free card: Mat makes things that are beautiful.

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#40. he saw that Gerritszoon was a searcher, too.

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#41. Then: I google "time-series visualization" and start work on a new version of my model, thinking that maybe I can impress her with a prototype. I am really into the kind of girl you can impress with a prototype.

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#42. Every day you learn something amazing," Kat says, "like there's a secret underground library in New York City" - she pauses and gapes for effect, and it makes me laugh - "and you realize there's so much more that's waiting. Eighty years isn't enough. Or a hundred. Whatever. It's just not.

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

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#44. Corvina must have been so different then ... really literally a different person. At what point do you make that call? At what point should you just give someone a new name? Sorry, no, you don't get to be Corvina anymore. Now you're Corvina 2.0 - a dubious upgrade.

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#45. Books: boring. Codes: awesome. These are the people who are running the internet.

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#46. Typographers are designers; designers are my people.

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#47. If this sounds impressive to you, you're over thirty.

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#48. Are there sexual fetishes that involve books? There must be. I try not to imagine how they might work.

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#49. (about Kindles) I have one and I use it most nights. I always imagine the books staring and whispering, Traitor!

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#50. None of this represented the glorious next stage of human evolution, but I was learning things. I was moving up.

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#51. Lapin breaks away from Broadway and picks a path toward Telegraph Hill. Her velocity is steady, even as the landscape rises underneath her; she's the little eccentric that could.

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#52. He asked < ... > Rosemary, why do you love books so much?
And I said, Well, I don't know < ... > I suppose I love them because they're quiet, and I can take them to the park.

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#53. Ometimes discipline is the truest form of kindness.

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#54. You know, I'm really starting to think the whole world is just a patchwork quilt of crazy little cults, all with their own secret spaces, their own records, their own rules.

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#55. Kat bought a New York Times but couldn't figure out how to operate it, so now she's fiddling with her phone.

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#56. There are plenty of people who, you know - people who still like the smell of books.

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#57. The whole economy suddenly felt like a game of musical chairs, and I was convinced I needed to grab a seat, any seat, as fast as I could.

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#58. What do you seek in these shelves?

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#59. I walk alone in the darkness and wonder how a person would begin to determine the circumference of the earth. I have no idea. I'd probably just google it.

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#60. The nature of immortality is a mystery,' he says, speaking so softly that we have to lean closer to hear.' But everything I know of writing and reading tells me that this is true. I have felt it in these shelves and in others.

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#61. So I switch to my MacBook and make my rounds: news sites, blogs, tweets. I scroll back to find the conversations that happened without me during the day. When every single piece of media you consume is time-shifted, does that mean it's actually you that's time-shifted?

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#62. Turning the pages of this encoded codex, I realize that the books I love most are like open cities, with all sorts of ways to wander in. This thing is a fortress with no front gate. You're meant to scale the walls, stone by stone.

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#63. I always thought the key to immortality would be, like, tiny robots fixing things in your brain," she says. "Not books.

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#64. 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 takes place in 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

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#65. At Google, they eat lunch on graph paper.

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#66. Let me give you some advice: make friends with a millionaire when he's a friendless sixth-grader.

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#67. Or what if he's weeping to himself in a lonely apartment somewhere, where his family never visits him because Grandpa Penumbra is weird and smells like books?

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#68. That's almost cute: Don't forget your ruler on your first day at cult! But where is 'down below'?

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#69. So I guess you could say Neel owes me a few favors, except that so many favors have passed between us now that they are no longer distinguishable as individual acts, just a bright haze of loyalty. Our friendship is a nebula.

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#70. He's like a storybook spirit, a little djinn or something, except instead of air or water his element is imagination.

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#71. This is no library. This is the Batcave.

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#72. We take the subway.Grumble's next message came through after breakfast, and it said:
theres a grumblegear3k waiting for you at 11 jay street in dumbo. ask for the hogwarts special. hold the shrooms.

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

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#74. They are developing a form of renewable energy that runs on hubris.

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#75. We need James Bond with a library science degree.

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#76. Your parents are weirdos, in the best possible way. They do not celebrate birthdays; never in your life have you received a present on the tenth of December. Instead, you are given books on the days that their authors were born.

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#77. Sometimes, you're stuck with a system too complicated to model completely.

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#78. Midway through, a fuzzy-chinned young man approaches the desk with a battered copy of Dune and a motley handful of coins. Mo waves him away. Oh, just take it, Felix. Spend the money on a haircut.

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#79. She's scrolling fast through my code, which is a little embarrassing, because my code is full of comments like 'Hell, yeah!' and 'Now, computer, it is time for you to do my bidding.

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

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#81. Our friendship is a nebula.

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#82. The outer perimeter of the facility is like a highway; this must be where all the popular artifacts hang out.

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#83. This sounds very interesting to me, but mostly because this girl is very interesting to me.

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#84. A fellowship of secret scholars spent five hundred years on this task. Now we're penciling it in for a Friday morning.

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#85. He has the strangest expression on his face- the emotional equivalent of 404 PAGE NOT FOUND.

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#86. I wonder if Cheryl realizes how historically significant the contents of this cardboard box are. "Oh, honey," she says, waving her hand, "everything in there is a treasure to somebody.

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#87. 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.

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#88. At best, the fellowship is founded on a false hope, and at worst, it's founded on a lie.

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#89. Why do organizations need to mark everything with their insignia? It's like a dog peeing on every tree. Google is the same way. So was NewBagel. Using

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#90. And then, on a sunny Friday morning, for three seconds, you can't search for anything. You can't check your email. You can't watch any videos. You can't get directions. For just three seconds, nothing works, because every single one of Google's computers around the world is dedicated to this task.

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#91. Kat is talking to someone else now, a slender brown-skinned boy who's joined the line just behind her. He's dressed like a skater, so I assume he has a PhD in artificial intelligence.

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#92. Now, for the first time in my life, I empathize 100 percent with Fluff McFly. My heart is beating at hamster-speed and I am throwing my eyes around the room, looking for some way out.

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#93. These days, the phone only carries bad news. It's all "your student loan is past due" and "your uncle Chris is in the hospital." If it's anything fun or exciting, like an invitation to a party or a secret project in the works, it will come through the internet.

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#94. Thank you, Teobaldo. You are my greatest friend. This has been the key to everything.

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#95. Yes, everyone else is smart, everyone else is cool, everyone else is healthy and attractive - but she brought you.

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#96. This cult seems like it might have been designed specifically to prey on bookish old people - Scientology for scholarly seniors.

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#97. Why do you love books so much?

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#98. He was a religious kid, and the goldsmith's trade turned him off. He spent all day melting old baubles down to make new ones - and he knew his own work was going to suffer the same fate. Everything he believed told him: This is not important. There is no gold in the city of God.

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#99. Its a museum's job to keep things for posterity,"Tabitha sniffs. "We have a temperature-controlled storage unit full of Christmas sweaters.

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#100. It is very quiet. I set my chin into my palm and count my friends and wonder what else is hiding in plain sight.

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