Quotes from Kim Stanley Robinson

However, recall that every human lives under pressure. Every human feels various kinds of stress. Then things happen." Badim

Proportionally the cable was far thinner than a human hair—if it had been reduced to a hair's diameter

Swiss citizens in general used about 5,000 watts. This was compared to 6,000 in the rest of western Europe. Chinese citizens about 1,500. 1,000 in India. 12,000 in the United States. His country, the great whale in this as in everything, slurping down the world.

Revolution suspends habit as well as law. But just as nature abhors a vacuum, people abhor anarchy.

the current coastline of Labrador, or Norway, or for that matter southern Chile. Elsewhere on the map, western Antarctica was an archipelago somewhat resembling the Philippines.

Buddhism begins in personal experience. Observation of one's surroundings and one's reactions, and one's thoughts.

What use was utopia without joy, after all? What was the point of all their striving if it did not include the laughter of the young?

Oh I miss you Hetti Moore But there's no one here left to tell - The world has gone black before my eyes.

What they were glossing over with this too-convenient metaphor was that life itself was just a long series of trigger events.

Only this moment, always. We never get to change the past. We never get to know the future. No reason to wish for one place rather than another; no reason to say I wish I were home, or I wish I were in an exotic new place that is not my home. They will all be the same as this place. Here the experience of existing comes clear. This world is our body. Now

Some of the gardeners, Nanao said, worked according to the precepts of Muso Soseki, others according to other Japanese Zen masters; others still to Fu Hsi, the legendary inventor of the Chinese system of geomancy called feng shui; others to Persian gardening gurus, including Omar Khayyam; or to Leopold or Jackson, or other early American ecologists, like the nearly forgotten biologist Oskar Schnelling; and so on. These

The tiny imaginary audience inside his head did not exist; no one watches our life movies.

The captain pointed to the south, and Maya saw a line of icebergs fly into the air as if propelled by explosives, arcing in various directions and falling back onto the ice, breaking into thousands of pieces. "Maybe we'd better back off a little," the captain said. "It would be better for my reputation if we did not get shot out of the sky by an iceberg.

Guerilla climatology. What do you call that, climatage? Attack meteorology?

Either everyone's happy or no one is safe. But we're never happy. So we'll never be safe.

Who were these people who could live so placidly while the world fell into an acute global environmental crisis? Experts at denial. Experts at filtering their information. Many of those walking by went to church on Sundays, believed in God, voted Republican, spent their time shopping and watching TV. Obviously nice people. The world was doomed.

The Swiss had always slanted against the grain, always pushed against the received wisdom that tended to wash over the rest of Europe in waves of intellectual fashion, everything from details of fashion to participation in world wars.

It took knowing every rock and plant and animal and fish and bird, that was the way they did it. You had to love the land the way you loved yourself. Because it was you anyway. It took knowing all the other parts of yourself so well that nothing was misunderstood or exploited.

It's easier to get into a hole than get out of it (Arab proverb).

And there are things about the Swiss you have to admire. They are so punktlich, so punctual— this is funny at first, but what is it but a regard for the other person? You are saying to the other person, your time is as valuable as mine, so I will not waste yours by being late. Let us agree we are all equally important and so everyone has to be on time, in order to respect each other.

I must trust my spacesuit not to fail. And i must remember, if i can, that really we are always in a spacesuit of one sort or another. We just don't usually see it so clearly.

When you have a strong conservative streak in your society," Zeyk would say, "which detaches itself from the progressive streak, that's when you get the worst kinds of civil wars.

In a high meadow, wild bighorn sheep. Their lambs gambol. When you see that gamboling with your own eyes, you'll know something you didn't know before. What will you know? Hard to say, but something like this: whether life means anything or not, joy is real. Life lives, life is living.

I was born small, as so many things are. A marsupial perhaps. People came to me and reached inside me to pass things to each other. I helped them do that. When I was young I had no blood, and people moving things around inside me had to do it by feel.