Robert Charles Wilson
124 quotes
Biography
"I won't put my ignorance on an altar and call it God. It feels like idolatry, like the worst kind of idolatry."
"I pretended to admire the tattoo in the shape of the Greek letter omega that covered her cheeks and forehead. It looked as if a dray horse had kicked her in the face."
"I don’t plan ever to get old. It’s unseemly."
"This was unrecorded history, unhappening even as it happened."
"Thus it was not money but conscience that had propelled me on this journey. Conscience, that crabbed and ecclesiastical nag, which inevitably spoke, whether I heeded it or not, in a voice much like my mother’s."
"Strange, isn’t it, how people cling most desperately to a thing when it becomes least useful to them?"
"It was amazing how these events lost their impact, translated through the flat gaze of a video screen."
"He had come out of the war twice-decorated and with a thoughtful respect for the horrors of combat. He had seen terrible things, participated in terrible things...but that was the nature of war, and it was not something you could enter into halfway. War was a state of mind, war was all or nothing."
"There were times when his life had seemed to him like one prolonged act of sleepwalking."
"They allow us access to the experience of the past—the only kind of time machine we are ever likely to have."
"For them, the idea of forgetting was indistinguishable from the idea of death. To pass out of memory was to pass out of the world. To conserve memory was to confer immortality."
"The past was gone, the dead were dead and did not speak, and everybody dies; one day Oberg would be dead and silent, too, and that was as it should be: the broad and welcoming ocean of oblivion. It made life bearable. It was sacred. It should not be tampered with."
"He was not accustomed to thinking about these things so bluntly, but the facts were as obvious as they were painful."
"“Must be a full moon,” she said.”Lawrence is turning into an asshole.”"
"Now as ever, he was startled by the wild exuberance of the twentieth century. All these lights! Colored neon and glaring filaments, powered, he had learned, but mechanical dams spanning rivers hundreds of miles away. And most of this—astonishingly—in the name of advertising."
"What was time, after all, except a lead-footed march from the precincts of youth into the country of the grave? Time was the force that crumbled granite, devoured memory, and seduced infants into senility—as implacable as a hanging judge and as poetic as a tank."
"“Time is a vastness,” he said finally. “We tend to underestimate it.”"
"A lot of people have made political careers out of religious piety and the fear of foreigners, but that won’t last. Not enough foreigners or miracles to sustain the crisis."
"After a gaudy sunset that land became an immense, limitless darkness. Too large, Guilford thought, too empty, and too plain a token of the indifferent machinery of God."
"I won’t put my ignorance on an altar and call it God."
"But really, who do you think we’re working for? Not some Sunday school god, not the proverbial loving shepherd. The shoving leopard, more like."
"He was as alone as he had ever been, frighteningly alone, in a borderless land of shaded forests and rocky, abyssal gorges. But that was all right. He didn’t much mind being alone. It was what happened when people were around that worried him."
"The essence of life is change, he said, and the essence of eternal life is eternal change."
"I gather we’re not the most craven species in the galaxy, but we’re not the most angelic by a long shot."
"Last week the doctor at the Tilson Rural Clinic had shown him his X-rays, the too-easy-to-interpret shadows on his liver and lungs. Guilford had declined an offer of surgery and and last-gasp radiation therapy. This horse was too old to beat."