Robert Charles Wilson Quotes

103 Sourced Quotes

[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
Some things are taken away from you, some you leave behind—and some you carry with you, world without end.

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

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

Robert Charles Wilson
The problem was the Voxish prophecies. Our founders had written them into the Coryphaeus as unalterable axioms—embedded truths, permanently exempt from debate or revision. That hadn't mattered when the rapture of the Hypotheticals was a distant goal toward which we moved in gradual increments. But now we had come to the blunt end of the question. Prophecy had collided with reality, and the obvious inference—that the prophecies might have been mistaken—was a possibility the Coryphaeus was forbidden to consider.

Robert Charles Wilson
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
Wow, Sue said. You actually stole this?
We don't use that word, Elaine told her. Chris has an unnamed high-level source.

Robert Charles Wilson
These movies belonged to the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—that period of great, unsustainable, and hedonistic prosperity, driven by the burning of Earth's reserves of perishable oil, which culminated in the False Tribulation, and the wars, and the plagues, and the painful dwindling of inflated populations to more reasonable numbers.

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

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

Robert Charles Wilson
I suppose he could have said this more gently, but what would be the point?

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

Robert Charles Wilson
His eyes were closed, shut tight on whatever battle his common sense was conducting with his faith.

Robert Charles Wilson
The rooms were confining, the windows minuscule, the ceilings perilously low. She could not have spent much money on the furnishings, which were shabby, threadbare, nicked, and splintered—I had seen better furniture abandoned at Montreal curbsides.
But if her book-cases were humble, they were bowed under the weight of surprisingly many books—almost as many as there had been in the library of the Duncan and Crowley Estate back in Williams Ford. It seemed to me a treasure more estimable than any fine sofa or plush footstool, and worth all the rough economies surrounding it.

Robert Charles Wilson
Sometimes the conscience makes demands that are non-negotiable. Courage has nothing to do with it. We weren't here because we were brave. We were here because we had to be here.

Robert Charles Wilson
You have a knack for turning your eyes inside out, so you see them. And they see you. And you're afraid, because they're from the uncreated future, from a place, I think, where the human race has reached its last incarnation, from the end of the material world. Perhaps the end of all worlds. And they're sad—melancholy is the better word—because you're like an angel to them, the angel of the past, the angel of infinite possibility. Possibility lost. The road not taken.

Robert Charles Wilson
All the brands and flavors of Big Salvation. At the last minute we would devise a technological fix and save ourselves. Or: the Hypotheticals were benevolent beings who would turn the planet into a peaceable kingdom. Or: God would rescue us all, or at least the true believers among us. Or. Or. Or.
Big Salvation. It was a honeyed lie. A paper lifeboat, even if we were killing ourselves trying to cling to it. It wasn't the Spin that had mutilated my generation. It was the lure and price of Big Salvation.

Robert Charles Wilson
For them, the idea of forgetting was indistinguishable from the idea of death. To pass out of memory was to pass out of the world. To conserve memory was to confer immortality.

Robert Charles Wilson
Bloody indeed, the President said. But we're not a nation that flinches at blood, nor are we a people constrained by feminine delicacy. To us all is permitted—even cruelty, yes, even ruthlessness—for we're the first in the world to raise the sword not in the name of enslaving and oppressing anyone, but in the name of freeing them from bondage. We must not be miserly with blood! Let there be blood, if blood alone can drown the old secular world. Let there be pain, and let there be death, if pain and death will save us from the twin tyrannies of Atheism and Europe.

Robert Charles Wilson
We live in an enlightened age, however, an age that has learned to see and to value other living things as they are, not as we wish them to be. And the long and creditable history of science has taught us, if nothing else, to look carefully before we judge—to judge, if we must, based on what we see, not what we would prefer to believe.

Robert Charles Wilson
They allow us access to the experience of the past—the only kind of time machine we are ever likely to have.

Robert Charles Wilson
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
When was it obvious she was ill?
Weeks ago. Or maybe—looking back on it—well—months.
Has she had any kind of medical attention? Pause. Simon?
No.
Why not?
It didn't seem necessary.
It didn't seem necessary?
Pastor Dan wouldn't allow it.
I thought: And did you tell Pastor Dan to go fuck himself?

Robert Charles Wilson
He's exactly what she wants. He's the last thing she needs.

Robert Charles Wilson
It was sad but completely understandable. Ten billion human beings without any cortical or limbic augmentation had simply acted to maximize their individual well-being. They hadn't given much thought to long-term consequences, but how could they? They had no reliable mechanism by which they could think or act collectively. Blaming those people for the death of the ecosphere made as much sense as blaming water molecules for a tsunami.

Robert Charles Wilson
Time is a vastness, he said finally. We tend to underestimate it.

Robert Charles Wilson
There were times when his life had seemed to him like one prolonged act of sleepwalking.

Robert Charles Wilson
The village muezzin called the faithful to prayer. Diane ignored the sound.

Robert Charles Wilson