Quotes from Kim Stanley Robinson

The real locals were like fish in water, unaware and unimpressed.

History is a wave that moves through time slightly faster than we do.

Each of us have a gift, you see, given us freely by the universe. And each of us with every breath gives something back

The dead hand of the past clutches us by way of living people who are too frightened to accept change.

We've been paying a fraction of what things really cost to make, but meanwhile the planet, and the workers who made the stuff, take the unpaid costs right in the teeth.

Every day we wake up into a new world, each sleep causes yet another reincarnation.

What's the monetary value of human civilization? Trying to answer that question proves you are a moral and practical idiot.

Reincarnation is a story we tell; then in the end it's the story itself that is the reincarnation.

This is what the human story is, not the emperors and the generals and their wars, but the nameless actions of people who are never written down, the good they do for others passed on like a blessing, just doing for strangers what your mother did for you, or not doing what she always spoke against. And all that carries forward and makes us what we are.

Language is but a huge set of false analogies. There has to be a better way to make a point.

And, you know, you never really summon all of your strength until you know that there's no way back, no way to go but onward.

We think now that love is a kind of giving of attention.

History is humankind trying to get a grip.

And Sarah still looked like the sexiest librarian on earth, which is as those of you who frequent libraries know means very sexy indeed, but with that added owlish touch that drives you wild.

The command to be free is a double bind

Ideology, n. An imaginary relationship to a real situation.

There are no secrets, there is no mystery. We make that all up. In fact, it's all right there in front of us. You have to have enough food to get through winter and spring. That's what it all comes down to. You have to live in a way that will gather enough food each fall to get through winter.

In a capitalist world, the word capital has taken on more and more uses. . . . human capital, for instance, which is what labor accumulates through education and work experience. Human capital differs from the classic kind in that you can't inherit it, and it can only be rented, not bought or sold.

Without an observer at a twenty three degree angle to the light being reflected 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. There is some new thing created at the contact of photon and retina, some space created between rock and mind.

Sometimes I think it's only post-scarcity that evil exists. Before that, it could always be put down to want or fear. It was possible to believe, as apparently you did, that when fear and want went away, bad deeds would too. Humanity would be revealed as some kind of bonobo, an altruistic cooperator, a lover of all.

Charlotte was coming to believe that arrogance was a quality not just correlated with but a manifestation of stupidity, a result of stupidity.

None of us know our real names.

I am a god and I am not a god. Either way, you are my creatures. I keep you alive. Inside I am hot beyond all telling, and yet my outside is even hotter. At my touch you burn, though I spin outside the sky. As I breathe my big slow breaths, you freeze and burn, freeze and burn. Someday I will eat you. For now, I feed you. Beware my regard. Never look at me.

Beauty is the promise of happiness. And the only happiness is action. ... Fate is the path of least action.