Quotes from Spin

Robert Charles Wilson ·  464 pages

Rating: (29.8K votes)


“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


About the author

Robert Charles Wilson
Born place: in Whittier, California, The United States
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Popular quotes

“Nevertheless, disease and misfortune knew no social bounds. Nor did the immensely dangerous business of childbirth.”
― Paula Brackston, quote from The Witch's Daughter


“I also teach you to love yourself first. It has nothing to do with ego. In fact, love is such a light that the darkness of the ego cannot exist in it at all. If you love others, if your love is focused on others, you will live in darkness. Turn your light toward yourself first, become a light unto yourself first. Let the light dispel your inner darkness, your inner weakness. Let love make you a tremendous power, a spiritual force.”
― Osho, quote from Love, Freedom, and Aloneness: The Koan of Relationships


“If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Life Without Principle


“Derken, müritlerden biri "Yalnızım Üstat," dedi, "saatlerin nalları göğsümü ezip duruyor."

El Mustafa ayağa kalktı ve ortalarında durdu; şiddetli bir rüzgârın sesine benzeyen bir sesle konuştu: "Yalnız! Ne var ki bunda? Yalnız geldin ve yalnız kaybolacaksın sis içinde.

İç öyleyse kadehinden yalnız ve sessizce. Güz günleri başka dudaklara başka kadehler verdi, acı ve tatlı şarap doldurdu kadehlerine, tıpkı senin kadehini doldurduğu gibi.

İç şarabını yalnız, kanının ve gözyaşlarının tadında olsa da; sana susuzluğu bağışladığı için hayata şükret. Çünkü susuzluk olmasa, yüreğin kurumuş bir denizin kıyısı olurdu ancak, şarkıdan ve meddücezirden yoksun.

İç şarabını yalnız, cezbe ve çoşkuyla iç!

Yukarı, başının üstüne kaldır kadehini, sonuna kadar, senin gibi yalnız içenlerin şerefine iç!

Bir gün, insanlarla arkadaşlığı aradım ve onların şölen sofralarına oturdum, yavaş yavaş içtim onlarla; ama şarapları başımı döndürmedi, bağrımı da yakmadı. Sadece ayaklarıma indi. Bilgeliğim susuz, kalbim kilitli ve mühürlü kaldı. Yalnız ayaklarım onların bulanık fikirleriyle arkadaş oldu.

Ve başka insanların arkadaşlığını aradım bir daha, ne de sofralarında onlarla şarap içtim.

Bunun için sana diyorum, saatlerin nalları göğsünü ezip dursa da, ne önemi var! Hüznünün kadehinden yalnız içmen iyidir, neşenin kadehinden de yalnız içeceksin.”
― Kahlil Gibran, quote from The Garden of The Prophet


“Thinking about moats can protect your investment capital in a number of ways. For one thing, it enforces investment discipline, making it less likely that you will overpay for a hot company with a shaky competitive advantage. High returns on capital will always be competed away eventually, and for most companies—and their investors—the regression is fast and painful.”
― quote from The Little Book That Builds Wealth: The Knockout Formula for Finding Great Investments


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