Robert Charles Wilson
We're as ephemeral as raindrops. We all fall, and we all land somewhere.Collection: Fall
Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere.Collection: Fall
There's no point living if you can't, at least occasionally, live.Collection: No Point
To capture the pawn, threaten the queen.Collection: Queens
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.Collection: Stars
You must not make the mistake of thinking that because nothing lasts, nothing matters.Collection: Mistake
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.Collection: Memories
From this new point of view, the universe I had inhabited became an object I could perceive in its entirety. It was a hypersphere embedded in a cloud of alternative states - the sum of all possible quantum trajectories from the big bang to the decay of matter. "Reality" - history as we had known or inferred it - was only the most likely of these possible trajectories. There were countless others, real in a different sense: a vast but finite set of paths not taken, a ghostly forest of quantum alternatives, the shores of an unknown sea.Collection: Real
Promises were like bad checks, easy to write and hard to cash.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Light
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.Collection: Stars
Does it strike you, Mr. Keller, that we live every day in the science fiction of our youth?Collection: Doe
There's no drug that'll make a stupid man smart.Collection: Stupid
An honest book is almost as good as a friend.Collection: Book
This would have been less annoying had it been untrue.Collection: Annoying
Goddamn you," Jacob said. "There's no damnation, Jacob. No Heaven but the forest and no God but the hive.Collection: Heaven
We're all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we're seldom formally introduced.Collection: Stranger
What we cannot remember, we must rediscover.Collection: Remember
Stupid people do stupid things, but people who are smart enough can do something really stupid.Collection: Smart
One doesn't have to understand in order to look. One has to look, in order to understand.Collection: Order
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.Collection: Self
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.Collection: Believe
I suppose the pursuit of fashion has always carried a price, monetary or otherwise.Collection: Fashion
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.Collection: Moving
Average people seldom talked about anything interesting and often hurt each other savagely.Collection: Hurt
Ah, books." Ziegler, smiling, came up behind me. "They bob like corks on an ocean. Float between worlds, messages in bottles.Collection: Book
Is there any evidence to the contrary? I don't need certainty in order to act on a well-founded suspicion.Collection: Order
John Scalzi is a fresh and appealing new voice, and Old Man's War is classic SF seen from a modern perspective—a fast-paced tour of a daunting, hostile universe.Collection: War
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 .Collection: Suicide
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.Collection: Doe
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.Collection: Garden
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.Collection: Imagination
It's partly the Southernization of America, in that the Southern working-class version of redneck is becoming the national version, and it's good-natured, it has humor and, in some ways, it's a performance.Collection: Redneck
We'll do what life always does defy expectations.Collection: Expectations
[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.Collection: Interesting
Evolution can't be predicted, Julian used to tell me; it's a scattershot business; it fires, but it doesn't aim.Collection: Fire
The Dutch at close proximity looked much like Americans, apart from their peculiar uniforms, and so it was their uniforms I fired at, half convinced that I was killing, not human beings, but enemy costumes, which had borne their contents here from a distant land; and if some living man suffered for his enslavement to the uniform, or was penetrated by the bullets aimed at it well, that was unavoidable, and the fault couldn't be placed at my feet. The private charade was not equivalent to Courage, but it enabled a Callousness that served a similar purpose.Collection: Men
You never stop being a parent, Adam, no matter how old or wise your child becomes you'll see.Collection: Wise
The world is what it is and won't be bargained with.Collection: World
And death? I don't fear death. I dread the absence of it.Collection: Absence
I won't put my ignorance on an altar and call it God. It feels like idolatry, like the worst kind of idolatry.Collection: Ignorance
It was the kind of experience, Molly said, that would grow calluses on an angel's ass.Collection: Angel
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.Collection: Knitting
I don't believe money is evil, but it can be terribly corrosive.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Eye
Children wear their natures like brightly-colored clothes; that's why they lie so transparently. Adulthood is the art of deceit.Collection: Art
I suppose every decade gets the music it deserves.Collection: Decades
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.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: War