“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.”
― Robert Charles Wilson, quote from Spin
“We're all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we're seldom formally introduced.”
― Robert Charles Wilson, quote from Spin
“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, quote from Spin
“Words like anchors, tethering boats of memory that would otherwise be settled by the storm.”
― Robert Charles Wilson, quote from Spin
“But the world is what it is and won’t be bargained with.”
― Robert Charles Wilson, quote from Spin
“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, quote from Spin
“...slept too long. And I don’t much like the world I woke up to.”
― Robert Charles Wilson, quote from Spin
“Ars moriendi ars vivendi est: the art of dying is the art of living.”
― Robert Charles Wilson, quote from Spin
“Mortality, a writer of my generation once said, trumps morality.”
― Robert Charles Wilson, quote from Spin
“Fifteen minutes shy of two o’clock. The thick of the night. The zone of lost objectivity.”
― Robert Charles Wilson, quote from Spin
“Amazing, I thought, how busily we had turned ourselves into people who didn't know one another very well.”
― Robert Charles Wilson, quote from Spin
“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, quote from Spin
“We are as ephemeral as rain drops.”
― Robert Charles Wilson, quote from Spin
“I wanted to sell tomorrow to the highest bidder and settle down forever in July second.”
― Robert Charles Wilson, quote from Spin
“Words like anchors, tethering boats of memory that would otherwise be scuttled by the storm.”
― Robert Charles Wilson, quote from Spin
“But physicians don’t really save lives, of course, we prolong them;”
― Robert Charles Wilson, quote from Spin
“And don’t you dare say you love me, because I know that’s not true. You don’t know the difference between being in love and conducting yourself like you’re in love. It’s nice you picked me, but it could have been anybody, and believe me, Tyler, it would have been just as disappointing, one way or another.”
― Robert Charles Wilson, quote from Spin
“Vanished children, I can't think where I lost them...”
― Robert Charles Wilson, quote from Spin
“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, quote from Spin
“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, quote from Spin
“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, quote from Spin
Robert Charles Wilson
Born place: in Whittier, California, The United States
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“Nature has endowed each of us with a capacity for kindly feelings: let us not squander them on others.”
― Marquis de Sade, quote from Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings
“Her good fortune, while not exactly making her shallow, had given her an insulated view from a window she didn’t care to move past.”
― Anne Frasier, quote from Hush
“What would have happened had he not been killed? He would certainly have had a rocky road to the nomination. The power of the Johnson administration and much of the party establishment was behind Humphrey. Still, the dynamism was behind Kennedy, and he might well have swept the convention. If nominated, he would most probably have beaten the Republican candidate, Richard M. Nixon. Individuals do make a difference to history. A Robert Kennedy presidency would have brought a quick end to American involvement in the Vietnam War. Those thousands of Americans—and many thousands more Vietnamese and Cambodians—who were killed from 1969 to 1973 would have been at home with their families. A Robert Kennedy presidency would have consolidated and extended the achievements of John Kennedy’s New Frontier and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The liberal tide of the 1960s was still running strong enough in 1969 to affect Nixon’s domestic policies. The Environmental Protection Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act with its CETA employment program were all enacted under Nixon. If that still fast-flowing tide so influenced a conservative administration, what signal opportunities it would have given a reform president! The confidence that both black and white working-class Americans had in Robert Kennedy would have created the possibility of progress toward racial reconciliation. His appeal to the young might have mitigated some of the under-thirty excesses of the time. And of course the election of Robert Kennedy would have delivered the republic from Watergate, with its attendant subversion of the Constitution and destruction of faith in government. RRK”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., quote from Robert Kennedy and His Times
“The thousands of wealth have fallen with wonders, said Rabbi Nathan of Nemirov. Do you find this unclear? It certainly sounds like the sort of thing thousands of wealth do. They fall. Does anyone know what the rabbi meant by wonders?”
― Annie Dillard, quote from For the Time Being
“Is every third human in this galaxy named Solo?"
Khalee Lah”
― Elaine Cunningham, quote from Dark Journey
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