Robert Charles Wilson Quotes & Sayings

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

There is something mournful and uneasy about waking up late at night on a moving train. The wheels clicked a bony rhythm, the engine growled like a distant Leviathan, and from time to time the whistle sounded a cry so lonesome it seemed to speak for the whole wide moonless night. — 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

Certainly it's a rare glimpse into the lives of the Secular Ancients. They don't seem as bad as the Dominion histories make them out to be. Though clearly they were imperfect."
"I don't deny that they were imperfect," Julian said in a distant voice. "I'm not uncritical of the Secular Ancients, Adam. They had all sorts of vices, and they committed one sin for which I can never bring myself to entirely forgive them."
"What sin is that?"
"They evolved into us," he said. — Robert Charles Wilson

Evolution can't be predicted, Julian used to tell me; it's a scattershot business; it fires, but it doesn't aim. — Robert Charles Wilson

One of the tenants here has a tumor on his face. It covers most of his right eye. Where I come from, it would have been treated and removed. So I find myself thinking, what if I get sick? Something as simple as appendicitis could kill me. I've had all the shots, but what happens when the vaccines wear off? As for the charm and innocence I hoped to find -- it exists, it really does, but consider what it's buried in. Racism. Misogyny and homophobia so absolute as to be nearly universal. — Robert Charles Wilson

Gods, the pamphlets asserted, were not supernatural beings, but tenuously living things, like ethereal plants, that evolved in concert with the human species. We were simply their medium - our brains and flesh the soil in which they sprouted and grew. — 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, beyond counting. — Robert Charles Wilson

You can't really comprehend events like that, I thought. You can only endure them. — Robert Charles Wilson

Nobody wants to conduct an autopsy on a dead saint. — Robert Charles Wilson

I wanted to sell tomorrow to the highest bidder and settle down forever in July second. — Robert Charles Wilson

The book was a pleasure to write, and I thought it both original and good, though what was original about it was not necessarily good, and what was good about it was not always original. — 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

knowledge wasn't created but discovered; — Robert Charles Wilson

Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere. — 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

From this new point of view, the universe I had inhabited became an object I could perceive in its entirety. It was a hypersphere embedded in a cloud of alternative states the sum of all possible quantum trajectories from the big bang to the decay of matter. "Reality" history as we had known or inferred it was only the most likely of these possible trajectories. There were countless others, real in a different sense: a vast but finite set of paths not taken, a ghostly forest of quantum alternatives, the shores of an unknown sea. — Robert Charles Wilson

Mortality, a writer of my generation once said, trumps morality. — Robert Charles Wilson

Some researchers had even concluded that the effort to understand the brain was necessarily doomed - that consciousness cannot comprehend consciousness any more than a box may contain itself. "This — Robert Charles Wilson

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

There's no drug that'll make a stupid man smart. — Robert Charles Wilson

The water in the ocean is like the water in a swimming pool, but you can't swim across it. — Robert Charles Wilson

Some pious men may find this truth unorthodox and bitter: But Nature, Chance, and Time ensure survival of the fitter! — Robert Charles Wilson

It was possible at last to hear the silence to appreciate that there was a silence, deep and potent, out there beyond the pretension of the light. — Robert Charles Wilson

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

Fifteen minutes shy of two o'clock. The thick of the night. The zone of lost objectivity. — Robert Charles Wilson

The rattle of plates and cutlery was the sound of empires falling. — Robert Charles Wilson

Times like this, with the wind moving the grass and curling around her like a huge cool hand, Tess felt the world as a second presence, as another person, as if the wind and the grass had voices of their own and she could hear them talking. — Robert Charles Wilson

Our truest and best American antiquity, as the Dominion History of the Union insisted, was the nineteenth century, whose household virtues and modest industries we had been forced by circumstance to imperfectly restore, whose skills were unfailingly practical, and whose literature was often useful and improving. — Robert Charles Wilson

If I am an agnostic, Calyxa, it's because I'm also a realist. — Robert Charles Wilson

But it was my first evidence that Diane lived in a world even bigger than the Big House, a world where grief and joy moved as ponderously as tides, with the weight of an ocean behind them. — Robert Charles Wilson

I thought of Einstein, and his insistence that no particular point of view was more privileged than any other: in other words his 'general relativity', and its claim that the answer to the question 'What is real?" begins with the question 'Where are you standing? — 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

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

I suppose every decade gets the music it deserves. — Robert Charles Wilson

Average people seldom talked about anything interesting and often hurt each other savagely. — 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

Maybe this was what the media was calling "desperate euphoria" - the we're-all-doomed-but-anything-can-happen feeling that had begun to peak around the time Wun went public. The end of the world, plus Martians: given that, what was impossible? What was even unlikely? And where did that leave the standard arguments in favor of propriety, patience, virtue, and not rocking the boat? — Robert Charles Wilson

As for the charm and innocence I hoped to find -- it exists, it really does, but consider what it's buried in. Racism. Misogyny and homophobia so absolute as to be nearly universal. Hatred of the Irish, the Italians, the Chinese -- not that many of them are seen in these parts — 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

When people come to understand how big the Universe is and how short a human life is, their hearts cry out. Sometimes it's a shout of joy. But for most of us it's a cry of terror. The terror of extinction, the terror of meaninglessness. Our hearts cry out. Maybe to God, or maybe just to break the silence. — Robert Charles Wilson

Ah, books." Ziegler, smiling, came up behind me. "They bob like corks on an ocean. Float between worlds, messages in bottles. — Robert Charles Wilson

Here she was back in the brightly lit world she had been avoiding for twenty years, and it was exactly as awful as she remembered it. — Robert Charles Wilson

But the world is what it is and won't be bargained with. — Robert Charles Wilson

We spent a lot of time discussing cosmology first. I think that was your father's unique way of evaluating people. You can tell a lot about a person, he once said, by the way they look at the stars. — Robert Charles Wilson

I was east of Skepticism and north of Faith, with an unsettled compass and variable winds. But I could offer up a prayer as well as the next man, and leave it to Heaven to judge the result. — Robert Charles Wilson

Are you just a car salesman or are you a poet too?" "I've never been accused of poetry before. — Robert Charles Wilson

And the strange thing was that it felt absolutely familiar, the curve of her arm under my hand and the weight of her head against my shoulder: not discovered but remembered. She felt the way I had always known she would feel. Even the tang of her fear was familiar. — 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

We'll do what life always does defy expectations. — Robert Charles Wilson

We're all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we're seldom formally introduced. — Robert Charles Wilson

She had made it clear, as had Damian, that although the marriage solemnized a real commitment, it didn't mean she and I were finished. But we saw each other far less often than we once had. And to be honest, I was a little uncomfortable about sleeping with a married woman. Not because the relationship was immoral but because it was brutally asymmetrical. — Robert Charles Wilson

Ars moriendi ars vivendi est: the art of dying is the art of living. — Robert Charles Wilson

What we cannot remember, we must rediscover. — 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

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

We are as ephemeral as rain drops. — 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

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

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

Suddenly I wanted the earlier version back, but there was no retrieving it. When I blurred the lines to soften them it was as if she began to disappear. — Robert Charles Wilson

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

John Scalzi is a fresh and appealing new voice, and Old Man's War is classic SF seen from a modern perspective - a fast-paced tour of a daunting, hostile universe. — Robert Charles Wilson

But physicians don't really save lives, of course, we prolong them; — Robert Charles Wilson

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

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

To capture the pawn, threaten the queen. — Robert Charles Wilson

Even a dry well may freshen. — Robert Charles Wilson

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

Amazing, I thought, how busily we had turned ourselves into people who didn't know one another very well. — 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

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

[H]e dreamed things for which he had no words. — Robert Charles Wilson

Stick out your arms," he'd say, "straight out at your sides," and when he had you in the appropriate cruciform position he'd say, "Left index finger to right index finger straight across your heart, that's the history of the Earth. You know what human history is? Human history is the nail on your right-hand index finger. Not even the whole nail. Just that little white part. The part you clip off when it gets too long. That's the discovery of fire and the invention of writing and Galileo and Newton and the moon landing and 9/11 and last week and this morning. Compared to evolution we're newborns. Compared to geology, we barely exist — Robert Charles Wilson

What a person runs from and what a person runs to aren't always as different as we hope. — Robert Charles Wilson

An honest book is almost as good as a friend. — Robert Charles Wilson

Vanished children, I can't think where I lost 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

Understanding is better than ignorance. Ignorance, unlike life, unlike narrative, is static. Understanding implies a forward motion, thus the possibility of change. — Robert Charles Wilson

Do you want to tell the truth, or do you want to tell a story? — Robert Charles Wilson

I want a better Bible, Adam. I want a Bible in which the Fruit of Knowledge contains the Seeds of Wisdom, and makes life more pleasurable for mankind, not worse. I want a Bible in which Isaac leaps up from the sacrificial stone and chokes the life out of Abraham, to punish him for the abject and bloody sin of Obedience. I want a Bible in which Lazarus is dead and stubborn about it, rather than standing to attention at the beck and call of every passing Messiah. — Robert Charles Wilson

Then his expression softened, as if he had solved a troublesome riddle. He smiled. "You do it," he said. Then he stepped over the edge. — Robert Charles Wilson

Words like anchors, tethering boats of memory that would otherwise be settled by the storm. — Robert Charles Wilson

Stupid people do stupid things, but people who are smart enough can do something really stupid. — Robert Charles Wilson

Sandra had studied psychiatry in order to understand the nature of despair, but all she had really learned was the pharmacology of it. The human mind was easier to medicate than to comprehend. — Robert Charles Wilson

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

It's partly the Southernization of America, in that the Southern working-class version of redneck is becoming the national version, and it's good-natured, it has humor and, in some ways, it's a performance. — 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

God, he asserted, was not contained in any Book, but was a Voice, which every human being could hear (and which most of us chose to ignore). The common name of that voice was Conscience; but it was a God by any reasonable definition, Stepney claimed. — 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

The Mysteries are the Mysteries, and ultimately personal maybe the most personal thing in the universe. Evangelism, in my opinion, is a failure of the imagination. Beware of prophets: the best visions are the ones they leave in the desert. — Robert Charles Wilson

[A]ll the ... people who visited me out of a sense of duty, who were relentlessly sympathetic and secretly indifferent. — Robert Charles Wilson

By definition, you can't experience your own death. Death is the end of consciousness. And consciousness persists. In the language of physics, consciousness is conserved.
I am the one who wakes up in the morning.
Always.
Every morning.
I don't die.
I just become increasingly unlikely. — Robert Charles Wilson

When does loyalty become martyrdom? — Robert Charles Wilson

Smoke poured from every chimney, for the day was cold. The thought of all those coal-grates and wood-stoves made me wary of fire, for these buildings were little more than tinder and brown paper, putting on airs of architecture. — Robert Charles Wilson

The view was in an unearthly way beautiful, but it was also unendurable. It implied too much — Robert Charles Wilson

To fire a bullet into the heart or brains of one's fellow man even a fellow man striving to do the same to you creates what might be called an unassimilable memory: a memory that floats on daily life the way an oil stain floats on rainwater. Stir the rain barrel, scatter the oil into countless drops, disperse it all you like, but it will not mix; and eventually the slick comes back, as loathsomely intact as it ever was. — Robert Charles Wilson

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

The territory through which we passed had been overbuilt in the days over the Secular Ancients, but only a few traces of that exuberant time remained, and a whole forest had grown up since then, maple and birch and pine, its woody roots no doubt entwined with artifacts from the Efflorescence of Oil and with the bones of the artifacts' owners. What is the modern world, Julian once asked, but a vast Cemetery, reclaimed by nature? Every step we took reverberated in the skulls of our ancestors, and I felt as if there were centuries rather than soil beneath my feet. — Robert Charles Wilson