Quotes from Kim Stanley Robinson

People's faces, staring in concert; this ran the world.

Autosuficiencia. Y un huevo. Somos putos monos. La clave siempre ha sido el trabajo en equipo.

She walked through the city, trying to get away from herself.

Praxis locals spoke French to him, and he could barely understand them. He had to listen hard, hoping his native tongue would come back to him, that the franglaisation and frarabisation he had heard about had not changed things too much; it was shocking to fumble in his native tongue, shocking too that the French Academy had not done its job and kept the language frozen in the seventeenth century like it was supposed to.

So what's the point? Why do it all? Why not be content with what you've got? Who were they, that they were so discontent? Who the fuck were they?

She seemed truly to abominate them, these little emblems of her body, as if viriditas were no more than a cancer that the rock must suffer.

Well, I may be a boar, but I am never boring.

you feel will also change—both in your body and in how you understand it as a meaning. Say the order of your time feels unjust and unsustainable and yet massively entrenched, but also falling apart before your eyes. The obvious contradictions in this list might yet still describe the feeling of your time quite accurately, if we are not mistaken.

Early that afternoon they came to a small town called Bradbury, which under its Nicosia-class tent looked like something out of Illinois: treelined blacktop streets, screened-in porches fronting two-story brick houses with shingle roofs, a main street with shops and parking meters, a central park with a white gazebo under giant maples.…

Que garantizar la seguridad y la prosperidad de la gente fuera bueno para la economía era una sorpresa muy grata para ellos. ¿Quién iba a pensarlo?

Spontaneous storms, and changes in color that were not tied to changes in wind speeds, and fractal borders, bounded infinities scrolling inside each other. We were looking at a mind thinking. A mind feeling. The woodwind glissando of the whale's cry.

But no matter their metaphysical details, each civilization was part of a world transferring wealth back and forth, back and forth, eventually to the elite groups; these movements of wealth became the driving force of change in human affairs—in other words, of history. Gathered wealth gathered more wealth.

There is no such thing as purity. It's an idea in the heads of religious fanatics, the kind of people who kill because they are so good and righteous.

Only when things fall apart do you realize it can happen to you. You never think it can happen to you, until it does.

They were not overwhelmed with emotion, but simply whelmed

I hate self-righteousness. I hate purity. There is no such thing as purity. It's an idea in the heads of religious fanatics, the kind of people who kill because they are so good and righteous. I hate those people, I do. If any of them are listening right now, then fuck you. I hate you.

Anytime people do something consciously for the last time, Samuel Johnson is reported to have remarked, they feel sad.

With practice one could dodge the past almost entirely.

The Amex man had even lifted his wrist to his mouth to take down a note, in a gesture obviously meant to be seen:

Humans are burning about 40 gigatons (a gigaton is a billion tons) of fossil carbon per year. Scientists have calculated that we can burn about 500 more gigatons of fossil carbon before we push the average global temperature over 2 degrees Celsius higher than it was when the industrial revolution began; this is as high as we can push it, they calculate, before really dangerous effects will follow for most of Earth's bioregions, meaning also food production for people.

John had been always happy, cheerful, confident—trustworthy loyal helpful friendly courteous kind obedient cheerful thrifty brave clean and reverent

In the infinite black space of ignorance, it is as if stands as the basic operation of cognition, the mark perhaps of consciousness itself. Human

he was a sort of dully furious Soviet bureaucrat, a petty man used to giving orders and being obeyed.

On her the plants seemed not to have had the effect they had had on him. She seemed truly to abominate them, these little emblems of her body, as if viriditas were no more than a cancer that the rock must suffer.