Robert Charles Wilson Quotes

103 Sourced Quotes

The suicidally disgruntled were legion, And their enemies included any and all Americans, Brits, Canadians, Danes, et cetera; or, conversely, all Moslems, dark-skinned people, non-English-speakers, immigrants; all Catholics, fundamentalists, atheists; all liberals, all conservatives... For such people the consummate act of moral clarity was a lynching or a suicide bombing, a fatwa or a pogrom. And they were ascendant now, rising like dark stars over a terminal landscape.

Robert Charles Wilson
Personally, I don't believe in anything more supernatural than what you read about in the Bible, and I only believe that one day out of seven.

Robert Charles Wilson
He was not accustomed to thinking about these things so bluntly, but the facts were as obvious as they were painful.

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

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

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

Robert Charles Wilson
What had been released into the desert vacuum and starry oases of the galaxy was the inexorable logic of reproduction and natural selection. What followed was parasitism, predation, symbiosis, interdependency—chaos, complexity, life.

Robert Charles Wilson
One doesn't have to understand in order to look. One has to look, in order to understand.

Robert Charles Wilson
If you understood the facts they needed no embroidery: all the wonder was already there, the more spellbinding because it was true.

Robert Charles Wilson
Don't tell me. It changed your life. I was smiling.
She smiled back. It didn't even change my mind.

Robert Charles Wilson
She gave me a disdainful look. Please don't make facile judgments about things you don't understand.

Robert Charles Wilson
The Dutch at close proximity looked much like Americans, apart from their peculiar uniforms, and so it was their uniforms I fired at, half convinced that I was killing, not human beings, but enemy costumes, which had borne their contents here from a distant land; and if some living man suffered for his enslavement to the uniform, or was penetrated by the bullets aimed at it—well, that was unavoidable, and the fault couldn't be placed at my feet.
The private charade was not equivalent to Courage, but it enabled a Callousness that served a similar purpose.

Robert Charles Wilson