Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes

35 Sourced Quotes

History was like some vast thing that was always over the tight horizon, invisible except in its effects. It was what happened when you weren't looking — an unknowable infinity of events, which although out of control, controlled everything.

Kim Stanley Robinson
There was nothing for it but to pace through just behind or ahead of the spooling present that was never there, caught in the nonexistent interval between the nonexistent past and the nonexistent future.

Kim Stanley Robinson
They were so ignorant! Young men and women, educated very carefully to be apolitical, to be technicians who thought they disliked politics, making them putty in the hands of their rulers, just like always. It was appalling how stupid they were, really, and he could not help lashing into them.

Kim Stanley Robinson
One of the chief features of incompetence was an inability to see it in oneself.

Kim Stanley Robinson
Science fiction rarely is about scientists doing real science, in its slowness, its vagueness, the sort of tedious quality of getting out there and digging amongst rocks and then trying to convince people that what you're seeing justifies the conclusions you're making. The whole process of science is wildly under-represented in science fiction because it's not easy to write about. There are many facets of science that are almost exactly opposite of dramatic narrative. It's slow, tedious, inconclusive, it's hard to tell good guys from bad guys — it's everything that a normal hour of Star Trek is not.

Kim Stanley Robinson
He often spoke aloud to himself now, or hummed, without ever noticing it, as if ignoring an old companion who always said the same things.

Kim Stanley Robinson
All the repetitions in the pattern were superficial; the moment was always new. It had to be lived, and then the next moment embraced as it arrived.

Kim Stanley Robinson
You could never teach other people anything that mattered. The important things they had to learn for themselves, almost always by making mistakes, so that the lessons arrived too late to help. Experience was in that sense useless. It was precisely what could not be passed along in a lesson or an equation.

Kim Stanley Robinson
You can't get any movement larger than five people without including at least one fucking idiot.

Kim Stanley Robinson
Childhood isn't just those years. It's also the opinions you form about them afterward. That's why our childhoods are so long.

Kim Stanley Robinson
Science was many things, Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists.

Kim Stanley Robinson
Utopia is the process of making a better world, the name for one path history can take, a dynamic, tumultuous, agonizing process, with no end. Struggle forever.

Kim Stanley Robinson
First you fall in love with Antarctica, and then it breaks your heart.

Kim Stanley Robinson
It was that sort of sleep in which you wake every hour and think to yourself that you have not been sleeping at all; you can remember dreams that are like reflections, daytime thinking slightly warped.

Kim Stanley Robinson
Easier to destroy the world than to change capitalism even one little bit.

Kim Stanley Robinson