Quotes from Kim Stanley Robinson

In a storm the Flatiron appeared to be moving toward me like the bow of a monster ocean steamer—a picture of new America still in the making. said Alfred Steiglitz

She thought about it. "I'm not sure it's possible. The Buddha said there are no gods, rather that there are sentient beings in everything, even clouds and rocks. Everything holy.

I see the hills look odd too. Not tectonic action, nor rain, nor riverbeds, nor glaciers, nor wind shaped these hills. They are uncanny. You can see something is different here, and it's hard not to feel it's wrong.

History directing evolution.

The revolt seemed to Nadia more a waste than ever, an unfocused spasm of rage, the ultimate cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.

Habits were such lies, such lies, lulling them into the feeling that there was something that was lasting, when really nothing lasted. This was the last time she would ever sit on this bench. If she came down to the corniche tomorrow and sat on this same bench, it would again be the last time, and there would again be nothing lasting about it.

the way bubbles work is structurally identical to Ponzi schemes—what a coincidence!—and indeed it's another amazing coincidence how much the entire capitalist economy resembles in its basic structure either a Ponzi scheme or a bundle of Ponzi schemes.

People only invoke history to ballast their arguments in the present." "Maybe

Do you think people get interested in studying psychology because they're troubled in the mind? It's a common theory.

Somehow he had become the very model of the modern Martian scientist;

Bad things don't just grow on one path, they're everywhere.

In general she had little patience for the minimalist arguments. "Isn't it the equivalent of letting the metanats run things?" she would say. "Letting might be right?

You hope, the stayers replied. You will have to trust in the kindness of strangers. They did not recognize this as a quotation. In general they were not aware that much of what they said had been said before, and was even in the public record as such. It was as if there were only so many things humans could say, and over the course of history, people had therefore said them already, and would say them again, but not often remember this fact.

So who else did you convince? Well, I got Joe to potty train himself, and then I convinced Anna to leave the kids at home and go with me on a vacation to Jamaica. Roy laughed heartily. Dreams are so funny. Yeah, but bold. So bold. Sometimes I wake up and wonder why I'm not as bold as that all the time. I mean, what have we got to lose?

The only part of an argument that really matters is what we think of the people arguing. X claims a, Y claims b. They make arguments to support their claims, with any number of points. But when their listeners remember the discussion, what matters is simply that X believes a and Y believes b. People then form their judgement on what they think of X and Y.

not know or had scarcely heard of, like Ingrid Bergman or Marilyn Monroe.

No happiness but in virtue. No, that wasn't true. Each part of the triune brain has its own happiness. Lizard in the sun, mammal on the hunt, human doing something good. What's good is good for the land. So when you worked as if on the hunt, in light and warmth, at making a landscape--some place for people to live in for ages to come--then you were triunely happy. Surely that should be enough. But then you wanted to share it. Just so there would be someone to be pleased together with.

Live for the future. A cosmic history read out of signs so subtle and mathematical that only the effort of a huge transtemporal group of powerful minds could ever have teased it out; but then those who came later could be given the whole story, with its unexplored edges there to take off into.

He was a fool. Annoying, as fools are. But there are always fools, Freya. People like him will always exist, and they don't matter. Don't you see? They just don't matter. Fools will always be with us. You have to leave them to it, and find your own way.

They [women] looked at you-they looked at everything-with a most piercing glance. They were the most curious animals of all, even more than their sisters fox and cat.

Memory was mind. And so, by a simple transitive equation, memory equaled life. So that with memory gone, life was gone.

Even the Chinese with their Belt and Road Initiative, and their local power in Asia, were not as bad as the Americans when it came to imperial self-regard pretending to be charity, as in the structural adjustment procedures at the end of the twentieth century

There are going to be some guaranteed catastrophes bearing down on you that you aren't going to be able to avoid (i.e. death), so evolution has kindly given you a strategically located mental blind spot, an inability to imagine future disasters in any way you can really believe, so that you can continue to function, as pointless as that may be...Useful. Except when disastrously bad.

What one would hope for in an ideology is clarity and explanatory breadth, and power. We leave the proof of this as an exercise for the reader.