Robert Charles Wilson Quotes

103 Sourced Quotes

Fortune had done him few favors in the past, and he wasn't sure he trusted it.

Robert Charles Wilson
There are so many kinds of time. The time by which we measure our lives. Months and years. Or the big time, the time that raises mountains and makes stars. Or all the things that happen between one heartbeat and the next. Its hard to live in all those kinds of times. Easy to forget that you live in all of them.

Robert Charles Wilson
He had come out of the war twice-decorated and with a thoughtful respect for the horrors of combat. He had seen terrible things, participated in terrible things... but that was the nature of war, and it was not something you could enter into halfway. War was a state of mind, war was all or nothing.

Robert Charles Wilson
Don't be upset. The world is full of surprises. We're all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we're seldom formally introduced.

Robert Charles Wilson
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
Kait was immediately bored. Children Kaitlin's age possess no context; one video event is much like another.

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

Robert Charles Wilson
But you're a Philosopher! Julian exclaimed at one point. This is Philosophy, not Religion, since you rule out supernatural beings—you know that as well as I do!
I suppose it is Philosophy, looked at from one angle, Stepney conceded. But there's no money in Philosophy, Julian. Religion is far more lucrative as a career.

Robert Charles Wilson
To whom had he retailed his conscience, Sandra wondered, and what was the going price these days?

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

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

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

Robert Charles Wilson
A man who submits himself wholeheartedly to God might handle them and not be harmed. That was the faith my father had professed. Certainly he trusted God, in his own case, and believed God manifested Himself in the rolled eyes of his congregants and in their babble of incomprehensible tongues. Trust and be saved, was his philosophy. And yet in the end it was the snakes that killed him. I wondered which element of the calculation had ultimately failed him—human faith or divine patience.

Robert Charles Wilson
We contrast the urban and the natural, but that's a contemporary myth. We're animals, after all; our cities are organic products, fully as natural (whatever that word really means) as a termite hill or a rabbit warren. But how much more interesting: how much more complex, dressed in the intricacies and exfoliations of human culture, simple patterns iterated into infinite variation. And full of secrets, secrets beyond counting.

Robert Charles Wilson
This would have been less annoying had it been untrue.

Robert Charles Wilson
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
Now as ever, he was startled by the wild exuberance of the twentieth century. All these lights! Colored neon and glaring filaments, powered, he had learned, but mechanical dams spanning rivers hundreds of miles away. And most of this—astonishingly—in the name of advertising.

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

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

Robert Charles Wilson
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
Try to imagine that Minkowski cube, Ray said, as a block of liquid water freezing (as contrary as this seems) from the bottom up. The progression of the freeze represents at least our human experience of the march of time. What is frozen is past, immutable, changeless. What is liquid is future, indeterminate, uncertain. We live on the crystallizing boundary.

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