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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

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

"A broken human being isn’t even a good tool."

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

"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."

"Zoe slowed but didn’t stop. She kept her hands in front of her, still a judicious distance from the animal. But close enough to smell it. Close enough to see the steam rising from its warm underbelly into the night air. Four billion years of un-Earthly evolution had shaped this aggregate of cells, this beast. She looked at it. And, amazingly, it looked at her. An impossible distance from the planet of her birth, this miracle had happened: Clay had made life. Life regarded life. First light, Zoe thought."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Ziegler said, “You know the story in the Bible, the story of Abraham and Isaac?” “Of course.” “God instructs Abraham to offer his son as a sacrifice. Isaac makes it as far as the chopping block before God changes his mind.” Yes. Jacob had always imagined God a little appalled at Abraham’s willingness to cooperate. Ziegler said, “What’s the moral of the story?” “Faith.” “Hardly,” Ziegler said. “Faith has nothing to do with it. Abraham never doubted the existence of God—how could he? The evidence was ample. His virtue wasn’t faith, it was fealty. He was so simplemindedly loyal that he would commit even this awful, terrible act. He was the perfect foot soldier. The ideal pawn. Abraham’s lesson: fealty is rewarded. Not morality. The fable makes morality contingent. Don’t go around killing innocent people, that is, unless you're absolutely certain God want you to. It’s a lunatic’s credo. “Isaac, on the other hand, learns something much more interesting. He learns that neither God nor his own father can be trusted. Maybe it makes him a better man than Abraham. Suppose Isaac grows up and fathers a child of his own, and God approaches him and makes the same demand. One imagines Isaac saying, ’No. You can take him if you must, but I won’t slaughter my son for you.’ He’s not the good and faithful servant his father was. But he is, perhaps, a more wholesome human being.”"

"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."

"To capture the pawn, threaten the queen."

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

"Ecstasy hates company."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"Don’t despise life."

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

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

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

"“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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"I suppose every decade gets the music it deserves."

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

"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."

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

"When does loyalty become martyrdom?"

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"Nobody wants to conduct an autopsy on a dead saint."