Robert Charles Wilson

Don’t be upset. The world is full of surprises. We’re all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we’re seldom formally introduced.

— Robert Charles Wilson

We’ll do what life always does—defy expectations.

— Robert Charles Wilson

“You learning anything from this?” Tyrell asked.Turk stood up and brushed his hands. “Yeah. I'm learning that I know even less than I thought I did.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

[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.

— Robert Charles Wilson

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

— Robert Charles Wilson

Fortune had done him few favors in the past, and he wasn’t sure he trusted it.

— Robert Charles Wilson

What we cannot remember, we must rediscover.

— Robert Charles Wilson

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

— Robert Charles Wilson

The village muezzin called the faithful to prayer. Diane ignored the sound.

— Robert Charles Wilson

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.

— Robert Charles Wilson

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.

— Robert Charles Wilson

These movies belonged to the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—that period of great, unsustainable, and hedonistic prosperity, driven by the burning of Earth’s reserves of perishable oil, which culminated in the False Tribulation, and the wars, and the plagues, and the painful dwindling of inflated populations to more reasonable numbers.

— Robert Charles Wilson

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

— Robert Charles Wilson

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

— Robert Charles Wilson

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.

— Robert Charles Wilson

“Truth is a perilous commodity,” Julian admitted, “but so is ignorance, Adam—more so.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

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

— Robert Charles Wilson

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.

— Robert Charles Wilson

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

— Robert Charles Wilson

Since Deacon Hollingshead’s arrival in town last July the Dominion had been hard at work, cleansing New York City of moral corruption.“Corruption” is a popular word with the enthusiasts of the Dominion, usually uttered as a prelude to the knife, the docket, or the noose.

— Robert Charles Wilson

Later Julian would give me another book he had culled from among the Archival duplicates, a short novel called The Time Machine by Mr. H. G. Wells, about a marvelous but apparently imaginary cart which carried a man into the future—and it fascinated me—but the Archive itself was a Time Machine in everything but name. Here were voices preserved on browning paper like pressed flowers, whispering apostasies into the ear of a new century.

— Robert Charles Wilson

“But you're a Philosopher!” Julian exclaimed at one point. “This is Philosophy, not Religion, since you rule out supernatural beings—you know that as well as I do!”“I suppose it is Philosophy, looked at from one angle,” Stepney conceded. “But there’s no money in Philosophy, Julian. Religion is far more lucrative as a career.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

A man who submits himself wholeheartedly to God might handle them and not be harmed. That was the faith my father had professed. Certainly he trusted God, in his own case, and believed God manifested Himself in the rolled eyes of his congregants and in their babble of incomprehensible tongues. Trust and be saved, was his philosophy. And yet in the end it was the snakes that killed him. I wondered which element of the calculation had ultimately failed him—human faith or divine patience.

— Robert Charles Wilson

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

— Robert Charles Wilson

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

— Robert Charles Wilson

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

— Robert Charles Wilson

“Sometimes he wears the crown,” Magnus Stepney once remarked, “and sometimes, by the grace of God, he takes the damned thing off.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

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

— Robert Charles Wilson

Deacon Hollingshead: “The history of the world is written in Scripture, and it ends in a Kingdom.”Julian Comstock: “The history of the world is written in sand, and it evolves as the wind blows.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

The afternoon is too tempting to be denied. It isn’t Paradise here, or even close, but the mimosa is in bloom and the air from the sea is cool and pleasant. On days like this I think of poor old Magnus Stepney’s evolving Green God, harking us all up to Eden. The Green God’s voice is faint enough that few of us hear it clearly, and that’s our tragedy, I suppose, as a species—but I hear it very distinctly just now. It asks me to step into the sunshine, and I mean to do its bidding.

— Robert Charles Wilson

Sandra had spent her days rendering pass/fail verdicts over troubled minds, applying tests most functional adults easily passed. Is the subject oriented to time and place? Does the subject understand the consequences of his actions? But if she could give the same test to humanity as a whole, Sandra thought, the outcome would be very much in doubt. Subject is confused and often self-destructive. Subject pursues short-term gratification at the expense of his own well-being.

— Robert Charles Wilson

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

— Robert Charles Wilson

She gave me a disdainful look. “Please don’t make facile judgments about things you don’t understand.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

To whom had he retailed his conscience, Sandra wondered, and what was the going price these days?

— Robert Charles Wilson

It was sad but completely understandable. Ten billion human beings without any cortical or limbic augmentation had simply acted to maximize their individual well-being. They hadn’t given much thought to long-term consequences, but how could they? They had no reliable mechanism by which they could think or act collectively. Blaming those people for the death of the ecosphere made as much sense as blaming water molecules for a tsunami.

— Robert Charles Wilson

What had been released into the desert vacuum and starry oases of the galaxy was the inexorable logic of reproduction and natural selection. What followed was parasitism, predation, symbiosis, interdependency—chaos, complexity, life.

— Robert Charles Wilson

What is inevitable is not death but change. Change is the only abiding reality. The metaverse evolves, fractally and forever. Saints become sinners, sinners become saints. Dust becomes men, men become gods, gods become dust.

— Robert Charles Wilson

“You think Wexler is lying?”“I think he’s fallible,” Byron had replied.

— Robert Charles Wilson

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

— Robert Charles Wilson

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.

— Robert Charles Wilson

There were times when his life had seemed to him like one prolonged act of sleepwalking.

— Robert Charles Wilson

They allow us access to the experience of the past—the only kind of time machine we are ever likely to have.

— Robert Charles Wilson

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.

— Robert Charles Wilson

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.

— Robert Charles Wilson

He was not accustomed to thinking about these things so bluntly, but the facts were as obvious as they were painful.

— Robert Charles Wilson

“Must be a full moon,” she said.”Lawrence is turning into an asshole.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

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.

— Robert Charles Wilson

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.

— Robert Charles Wilson

“Time is a vastness,” he said finally. “We tend to underestimate it.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

Guilford thought he knew what science was. It was nothing more than curiosity...tempered by humility, disciplined with patience.Science meant looking—a special kind of looking. Looking especially hard at the things you didn’t understand. Looking at the stars, say, and not fearing them, not worshiping them, just asking questions, finding the question that would unlock the door to the next question and the question beyond that.

— Robert Charles Wilson

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.

— Robert Charles Wilson

There are so many kinds of time. The time by which we measure our lives. Months and years. Or the

— Robert Charles Wilson

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.

— Robert Charles Wilson

I won’t put my ignorance on an altar and call it God.

— Robert Charles Wilson

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.

— Robert Charles Wilson

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.

— Robert Charles Wilson

The essence of life is change, he said, and the essence of eternal life is eternal change.

— Robert Charles Wilson

I gather we’re not the most craven species in the galaxy, but we’re not the most angelic by a long shot.

— Robert Charles Wilson

“Maybe you were better off not knowing.”“Ignorance is not bliss.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

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.

— Robert Charles Wilson

He hated the idea of eulogizing himself. Some tasks are best left to others, surely including obituaries.

— Robert Charles Wilson

That worries me. One death is attrition; two would look like incompetence—on someone’s part.

— Robert Charles Wilson

“The planet doesn’t hate you,” Theo had once said. “But its intimacies are fatal.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

Perfect aristocratic tone, Degrandpre thought: insult and menace in a single phrase.

— Robert Charles Wilson

She understood too much. She understood that she had reached her destiny point, that time and the circumstances of her life had conspired to bring her to this place. For one ecstatic moment she was the axis on which the stars revolved.

— Robert Charles Wilson

Here was the real horror, Degrandpre thought, this breaking of barriers. Civilization, after all, was the making of divisions, of walls and fences to parse the chaotic wild into ordered cells of human imagination. Wilderness invades the garden and reason is overthrown.

— Robert Charles Wilson

The awful thing about lying was that it became a habit, then a reflex, as automatic as the blinking of the eyes or the voiding of the bowels. Lying was the Terrestrial disease, his mother used to say.

— Robert Charles Wilson

Life invented it first, Zoe thought, like so many other things. Like eyes: Turning photon impacts into neurochemical events with such subtlety that a frog can target a fly and a man can admire a rose.

— Robert Charles Wilson

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.

— Robert Charles Wilson

To capture the pawn, threaten the queen.

— Robert Charles Wilson

“Goddamn you,” Jacob said.“There’s no damnation, Jacob. No Heaven but the forest and no God but the hive.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

Ecstasy hates company.

— Robert Charles Wilson

We contrast the urban and the natural, but that’s a contemporary myth. We’re animals, after all; our cities are organic products, fully as “natural” (whatever that word really means) as a termite hill or a rabbit warren. But how much more interesting: how much more complex, dressed in the intricacies and exfoliations of human culture, simple patterns iterated into infinite variation. And full of secrets, secrets beyond counting.

— Robert Charles Wilson

You have a knack for turning your eyes inside out, so you see them. And they see you. And you're afraid, because they’re from the uncreated future, from a place, I think, where the human race has reached its last incarnation, from the end of the material world. Perhaps the end of all worlds. And they’re sad—melancholy is the better word—because you're like an angel to them, the angel of the past, the angel of infinite possibility. Possibility lost. The road not taken.

— Robert Charles Wilson

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

— Robert Charles Wilson

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.

— Robert Charles Wilson

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

— Robert Charles Wilson

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

— Robert Charles Wilson

“Don’t tell me. It changed your life.” I was smiling.She smiled back. “It didn’t even change my mind.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

And death?I dread the absence of it.

— Robert Charles Wilson

“Consciousness,” according to current scientific thought, was something the higher mammals had evolved in order to help them reproduce, much the way a garden slug secretes slime. It had no special ontological status. The “self” was a genetically modulated and biologically useful illusion.

— Robert Charles Wilson

The Mysteries are the Mysteries, and ultimately personal—maybe the most personal thing in the universe. Evangelism, in my opinion, is a failure of the imagination. Beware of prophets: the best visions are the ones they leave in the desert.

— Robert Charles Wilson

Kait was immediately bored. Children Kaitlin’s age possess no context; one video event is much like another.

— Robert Charles Wilson

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.

— Robert Charles Wilson

Try to imagine that Minkowski cube, Ray said, as a block of liquid water freezing (as contrary as this seems) from the bottom up. The progression of the freeze represents at least our human experience of the march of time. What is frozen is past, immutable, changeless. What is liquid is future, indeterminate, uncertain. We live on the crystallizing boundary.

— Robert Charles Wilson

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

— Robert Charles Wilson

The most fundamental parental urge is the urge to nurture and protect. To grieve for a child is to admit ultimate impotence. You can’t protect what goes into the ground. You can’t tuck a blanket around a grave.

— Robert Charles Wilson

I suppose every decade gets the music it deserves.

— Robert Charles Wilson

I suppose he could have said this more gently, but what would be the point?

— Robert Charles Wilson

Sometimes the conscience makes demands that are non-negotiable. Courage has nothing to do with it. We weren’t here because we were brave. We were here because we had to be here.

— Robert Charles Wilson

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

— Robert Charles Wilson

When does loyalty become martyrdom?

— Robert Charles Wilson

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.

— Robert Charles Wilson

I want them not to forget. Which is, I suppose, what all aged veterans want. But they’ll forget. Of course they will. And their children will know less of us than they do, and their children’s children will find us barely imaginable.Which is as it should be. You can’t stop time.

— Robert Charles Wilson

Times like this, with the wind moving the grass and curling around her like a huge cool hand, Tess felt the world as a second presence, as another person, as if the wind and the grass had voices of their own and she could hear them talking.

— Robert Charles Wilson

If you understood the facts they needed no embroidery: all the wonder was already there, the more spellbinding because it was true.

— Robert Charles Wilson

Nobody wants to conduct an autopsy on a dead saint.

— Robert Charles Wilson

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

— Robert Charles Wilson

“Wow,” Sue said. “You actually stole this?”“We don’t use that word,” Elaine told her. “Chris has an unnamed high-level source.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

His heart was in the right place. He wanted a religion that could plausibly comfort widows and orphans without committing them to patriarchy, intolerance, fundamentalism, or weird dietary laws. He wanted a religion that wasn’t in a perpetual fistfight with modern cosmology.

— Robert Charles Wilson

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.

— Robert Charles Wilson

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

— Robert Charles Wilson

This would have been less annoying had it been untrue.

— Robert Charles Wilson

His fertility cycles meant little to him. In his lifetime, he knew, he might make only one or two real contributions to the City’s genetic continuity, his viral gametes combining with others in the bodies of the night feeders to become morphologically active. It was abstractly pleasing, though, to realize he had cast his own essence into the ocean of probability, where it might come floating back unknown to him, as a fresh citizen with new and unique ideas and odors.

— Robert Charles Wilson

Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere.

— Robert Charles Wilson

Along with a dozen other students I had dissected a human cadaver and sorted its contents by size, color, function, and weight. There was nothing pleasant about the experience. Its only consolation was its truth and its only virtue was its utility.

— Robert Charles Wilson

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

— Robert Charles Wilson

He’s exactly what she wants. He’s the last thing she needs.

— Robert Charles Wilson

The suicidally disgruntled were legion, And their enemies included any and all Americans, Brits, Canadians, Danes, et cetera; or, conversely, all Moslems, dark-skinned people, non-English-speakers, immigrants; all Catholics, fundamentalists, atheists; all liberals, all conservatives...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.

— Robert Charles Wilson

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

— Robert Charles Wilson

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

— Robert Charles Wilson

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.

— Robert Charles Wilson

An honest book is almost as good as a friend.

— Robert Charles Wilson

He rolled his eyes. “Those are things people say, Tyler. Talking about multilateralism and diplomacy is like saying ‘I love you’—it serves to facilitate the fucking.

— Robert Charles Wilson

“When was it obvious she was ill?”I thought: And did you tell Pastor Dan to go fuck himself?

— Robert Charles Wilson

His eyes were closed, shut tight on whatever battle his common sense was conducting with his faith.

— Robert Charles Wilson

“It never fails to astonish me,” Carol said. “The tenacity of love.”

— Robert Charles Wilson