Robert Charles Wilson Quotes

103 Sourced Quotes

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
[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
Children wear their natures like brightly-colored clothes; that's why they lie so transparently. Adulthood is the art of deceit.

Robert Charles Wilson
Goddamn you, Jacob said.
There's no damnation, Jacob. No Heaven but the forest and no God but the hive.

Robert Charles Wilson
Later Julian would give me another book he had culled from among the Archival duplicates, a short novel called The Time Machine by Mr. H. G. Wells, about a marvelous but apparently imaginary cart which carried a man into the future—and it fascinated me—but the Archive itself was a Time Machine in everything but name. Here were voices preserved on browning paper like pressed flowers, whispering apostasies into the ear of a new century.

Robert Charles Wilson
You think Wexler is lying?
I think he's fallible, Byron had replied.

Robert Charles Wilson
It never fails to astonish me, Carol said. The tenacity of love.

Robert Charles Wilson
His fertility cycles meant little to him. In his lifetime, he knew, he might make only one or two real contributions to the City's genetic continuity, his viral gametes combining with others in the bodies of the night feeders to become morphologically active. It was abstractly pleasing, though, to realize he had cast his own essence into the ocean of probability, where it might come floating back unknown to him, as a fresh citizen with new and unique ideas and odors.

Robert Charles Wilson
He rolled his eyes. Those are things people say, Tyler. Talking about multilateralism and diplomacy is like saying 'I love you'—it serves to facilitate the fucking.

Robert Charles Wilson
The conversation was mesmerizing, not for its content but for the cadences of the talk, the rhythm we fell into when we were alone, now as before. Every conversation between friends or lovers creates its own easy or awkward rhythms, hidden talk that runs like a subterranean river under even the most banal exchange.

Robert Charles Wilson
The world is what it is and won't be bargained with.

Robert Charles Wilson
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
You never stop being a parent, Adam, no matter how old or wise your child becomes—you'll see.

Robert Charles Wilson
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