Robert Charles Wilson Quotes

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

[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.

Nobody wants to conduct an autopsy on a dead saint.

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 .

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.

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

To capture the pawn, threaten the queen.

I don't believe money is evil, but it can be terribly corrosive.

I won't put my ignorance on an altar and call it God. It feels like idolatry, like the worst kind of idolatry.

Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere.

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

Ecstasy hates company.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Some things are taken away from you, some you leave behind and some you carry with you, world without end.

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

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

And death? I don't fear death. I dread the absence of it.

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.

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.

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

When does loyalty become martyrdom?

Do you want to tell the truth, or do you want to tell a story?

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.

An honest book is almost as good as a friend.

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

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

This would have been less annoying had it been untrue.

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

What we cannot remember, we must rediscover.

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

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

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

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.

I suppose every decade gets the music it deserves.

We'll do what life always does defy expectations.

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

The universe, it seemed, was full to brimming with lonesome places.

Are you just a car salesman or are you a poet too?” “I've never been accused of poetry before.

Ars moriendi ars vivendi est: the art of dying is the art of living.

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.