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Robert Charles Wilson
155 quotes
“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 (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You must not make the mistake of thinking that because nothing lasts, nothing matters.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Truth is a perilous commodity,” Julian admitted, “but so is ignorance, Adam—more so.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If I am an agnostic, Calyxa, it’s because I'm also a realist.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I suppose the pursuit of fashion has always carried a price, monetary or otherwise.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You never stop being a parent, Adam, no matter how old or wise your child becomes—you'll see.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Do you want to tell the truth, or do you want to tell a story?”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Is there any evidence to the contrary? I don’t need certainty in order to act on a well-founded suspicion.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sometimes he wears the crown,” Magnus Stepney once remarked, “and sometimes, by the grace of God, he takes the damned thing off.”
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“Some pious men may find this truth unorthodox and bitter: But Nature, Chance, and Time ensure survival of the fitter!”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Deacon Hollingshead: “The history of the world is written in Scripture, and it ends in a Kingdom.” Julian Comstock: “The history of the world is written in sand, and it evolves as the wind blows.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The afternoon is too tempting to be denied. It isn’t Paradise here, or even close, but the mimosa is in bloom and the air from the sea is cool and pleasant. On days like this I think of poor old Magnus Stepney’s evolving Green God, harking us all up to Eden. The Green God’s voice is faint enough that few of us hear it clearly, and that’s our tragedy, I suppose, as a species—but I hear it very distinctly just now. It asks me to step into the sunshine, and I mean to do its bidding.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sandra had spent her days rendering pass/fail verdicts over troubled minds, applying tests most functional adults easily passed. Is the subject oriented to time and place? Does the subject understand the consequences of his actions? But if she could give the same test to humanity as a whole, Sandra thought, the outcome would be very much in doubt. Subject is confused and often self-destructive. Subject pursues short-term gratification at the expense of his own well-being.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Some things are taken away from you, some you leave behind—and some you carry with you, world without end.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She gave me a disdainful look. “Please don’t make facile judgments about things you don’t understand.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To whom had he retailed his conscience, Sandra wondered, and what was the going price these days?”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There was no mind in back of those words, Ethan reminded himself. Nothing but a series of highly-evolved algorithms aimed as achieving a strategic result. Engaging in dialogue with such a creature was no more useful than trying to fend off a scorpion by quoting Voltaire.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And the hypercolony would lie. More precisely, it would say whatever advanced its interests. The distinction between truth and falsehood was irrelevant to the hypercolony, perhaps even imperceptible to it. It generated human language solely for the purpose of manipulating human behavior.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ris, it can’t tell the truth—it can’t distinguish between truth and lies. You know that. It uses words to manipulate people.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Cassie had seen pictures in textbooks, of ranks of men in brown uniforms with rifles slung over their shoulders: the Allied Expeditionary Force, off to join the battered Brits and French. And pictures of the muddy European trenches: Ypres, Passchendaele, the Marne, where countless young men had been slaughtered by other young men as bewildered and obedient as themselves.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life shites on hope.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So we can trust each other.” “It’s the rest of the world we can’t be sure about.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So are they some form of life, or are they machines?” “At the chemical level all living things can be construed as machines.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What are you saying, you think he’s completely sane?” “No. But I’m not sure any of us rises to that standard.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All the pious high-school bullshit about the Century of Peace had been revealed for what it was: as artificial as a plastic nativity scene and as hollow as a split piñata. The world was peaceful the way a drunken coed passed out at a frat party was peaceful: it was the peace that facilitated the fucking.”
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“The only reason you can’t see how crazy this is is because we’ve been neck-deep in crazy for years.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even if you could talk to it, you wouldn’t learn anything. All it would tell you is what it wanted you to hear. Or no, not even what it wants you to hear; it would generate words that in some kind of model of possible outcomes produce a result that enhances the likelihood of its reproductive success.” “I do that too,” Leo said. “From time to time.” Smiling. “Smartass,” Cassie said.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And the question she found herself asking now that Leo was asleep beside her was: had she fallen in love? Because that was how it felt. But only a few minutes ago her body had exploded into an orgasm so intense that it probably registered on the Richter scale, so maybe her judgment wasn’t entirely unbiased.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“His sympathy (that is, for a caterpillar parasitized by a wasp) was an anthropomorphism, a projection. The caterpillar was hardly more than a protein engine enacting a suite of encoded behaviors. A meat robot. As am I, except that in the case of Ethan’s species evolution had conjured a knowing self out of chemistry and contingency. I feel, therefore I abhor.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Violence is the great attractor of human history, Dr. Iverson. A force almost as irresistible as gravity.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Baumgartner’s coke habit isn’t the secret she thinks it is, and it gives us leverage.” “Coke?” “Coke, yeah, you know: cocaine. When she powders her nose, she literally powders her nose.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Not all idealism is fake.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s complicated, Jesse. There’s the official story. There’s the real story. And there’s the conspiracy theory.” “Tell me the real story.” “I would, but I don’t know what it is.” “Well, then what’s the official story? And who declared it official?”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There’s no forgiveness built into the system. I told Barbara so, dozens of times. She was always marching off to save the whales, save the trees, save some goddamn thing. It was endearing. But in the back of my head I always heard Dad’s voice: ‘This is only a holding action. Nothing is ever really saved.’ Barbara thought the greenhouse effect was like a virus, something you could stop if you came up with the right vaccine. I told her it was a cancer—the cancer of humanity on the vital organs of the earth. You can’t stop that by marching.” “Isn’t that a little like giving up?” “I think it’s called acceptance.” Archer stood and walked to the door, where his silhouette obscured the motion of the trees. “Very bleak attitude, Tom.” “Experience bears it out.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source