Quotes from Kim Stanley Robinson

This perpetual rise and fall now got measured to an obsessive-compulsive degree, understandable given the traumas of the last century and the distinct possibility of future traumas. Sea level had for the most part stabilized after the Second Pulse, but there was still a lot of Antarctic ice teetering on the brink, so past performance was no guarantee of future anything.

You just don't have faith!" Frank repeated. "Well I hope I never get it! It's like being hit by a hammer in the head!

You've located intrinsic worth in the wrong place," she said to all of them, over the common band. "It's like a rainbow. Without an observer at a twenty-three-degree angle to the light reflecting off a cloud of spherical droplets, there is no rainbow. The whole universe is like that. Our spirits stand at a twenty-three-degree angle to the universe.

Old European joke: in heaven the cooks are French, the police British, the engineers German, the lovers Italian, while in hell the cooks are British, the police German, the engineers Italian.

But no one ever saw the full spectacle, for no witnesses had the senses necessary. Proportionally the cable was far thinner than a human hair—if it had been reduced to a hair's diameter, it would still have been hundreds of kilometers long

Of course I will like forever any woman who has gone to bed with me, as long as we don't become a couple and hate each other forever.

We are more than food and drink and shelter. It seems like those should be the crucial determinants, but many a well-fed citizen is filled with rage and fear.

The town was made of cubical buildings with steep roofs, each one painted a bright primary color that through the long winters was said to be cheering.

it looked like the centuries-long wrestling match between state and capital had ended in a decisive victory for capital. Possibly

There is a real situation, that can't be denied, but it is too big for any individual to know in full, and so we must create our understanding by way of an act of the imagination.

we can't think in anything but economic terms, our ethics must be quantified and rated for the effects that our actions have on GDP. This

The rich, being people too, doing all they could to cope with the night sweats and zombie terrors of making fourteen hundred times as much money as the people working for them, made

Why have a word for something they'd never seen?

Wheat is blond in the Steppe, yellow in the Prairie. Algae in the labs is many different brownish greens.

when you are a small minority and you own the majority's wealth, security is naturally a primary consideration.

To hope without hope, which would be wise, is impossible. —MARCEL PROUST, Les Plaisirs et les Jours

It's the love of right lures men to wrong.

the passenger compartment of this one goes right to the moon. The booster stage will come back down after your launch and land right over there." She pointed across the concrete

This is your life, Frank. What would you do without it?

He can't characterize this landscape yet, it's too new, but there's something inits complexity, the anarchic profusion of forms, that is mesmerizing to watch. Nothing has been planned. No two things are the same. And yet everything has an intense coherence.

Anyway that's a large part of what economics is—peo-ple arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven't just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful.

Sure, we could have big trucks too. We could have a monster truck pull right on the White House lawn." "Monster truck." Joe smiled at the phrase.

first bars of Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony.

twenty million years.