Robert Charles Wilson Quotes

To capture the pawn, threaten the queen.

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

Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Promises were like bad checks, easy to write and hard to cash.

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.

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.

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

There's no drug that'll make a stupid man smart.

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.

This would have been less annoying had it been untrue.

An honest book is almost as good as a friend.

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

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

What we cannot remember, we must rediscover.

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

Stupid people do stupid things, but people who are smart enough can do something really stupid.

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.

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

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

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