Quotes from Kim Stanley Robinson

We were simply strip-mining the lifeworld, as one Germanic voice from the screen put it, sounding like Werner Herzog to a lot of us, and I have no doubt he could have been involved, and that in German words like lifeworld would be real words already.

It grew in the dark, it's a stack, a hyperobject, an accidental megastructure. No

Any physical action, properly studied and practiced, could no doubt be accomplished with a reasonable amount of skill, if not flair.

it would take 2,000 Vietnam Memorials to list the century's war dead. . . . he saw himself walking the Mall in Washington, D.C., and the whole park from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial was dotted with the black Vs of Vietnam Memorials, as if a flock of giant stealth birds had landed on it. All night he walked past black wing walls, moving west toward the white tomb on the river.

Therefore, simple syllogism: human language is futile and stupid. Meaning furthermore that human narratives are futile and stupid.

The beautiful statue of Ganymede and the eagle looked like they had been molded out of white ceramic, and in Ganymede's outstretched arms it seemed to me a whole world was being embraced, a rushing world of gray sky and gray water where everything passed by so fast that you cnever got the chance to hold it, to touch it, to make it yours. Can't we keep anything?

all of them we went to Desolation, despite the

a streetlight reflected off the black cobblestones . . . in such a way that there were thousands of brief white squiggles underfoot, looking like names engraved on black granite, as if the whole surface of the earth were paved by a single memorial.

Very little of the high Sierra makes it into its images. If you see a pretty photo from the Sierras, you always have to remember, it was a zillion times more beautiful than that!

The morning Post included an article informing Charlie that a chunk of the Ross Ice Shelf had broken off, a chunk more than half the size of France.

viriditas were no more than a cancer that the rock must suffer.

I believe that Man is good. I believe that we stand at the dawn of a century that will be more peaceful and prosperous than any in history.

Zurich in winter is often smothered in fog and low clouds for months on end. Prevailing winds from the north ram the clouds coming in from the Atlantic against the wall of the Alps, and there they stick. Gray day after gray day, in a gray city by a gray lake, split by a gray river.

texts are written for people to read later.

but then he remembered that the cortex inhibits the lower centers of the brain, so that low cortical arousal allows the more uninhibited behavior of the extrovert, while high cortical arousal is inhibitory and leads to introversion. This explained why drinking alcohol, a depressant which lowers cortical arousal, could lead to more excited and uninhibited behavior.

I realized right then and there, the world was real. The World was real .

My body worked so well that eventually all things everywhere were swallowed and digested by me. I grew so large that I ate the world, and all the blood in the world is mine. What am I? You know, even though you are like everything else, and see me from the inside. I am the market.

I don't think you can get good answers to questions about—human nature. Better to think of it as a black box. You can't apply the scientific method. Not well enough to be sure of your answers.

That was standard Keynesian practice, a kind of pump-priming used by governments ever since the third New Deal of 1938, as Diane told them now, with World War II itself an even bigger example.

The blow killed Babe and Paul Bunyan both, and after that Paul had to admit that he was beat. But his own bacteria ate him, naturally, and they crawled all around down on the bedrock and under the megaregolith, down there going everywhere, sucking up the mantle heat, and eating the sulfides, and melting down the permafrost. And everywhere they went down there, every one of those little bacteria said I am Paul Bunyan.

Russia kept selling its oil and gas, which was a good thing for Europe, as much of Europe was heated in winter by Russian gas. As was made clear when the pipelines were bombed in the coldest part of that winter.

We live in a world where people pretend money can buy you anything, so money becomes the point, so we all work for money. Money is thought of as value.

We pretend that democracy is real, and

Best to strip all statements of real content, this was a basic law of diplomacy.