Quotes from Kim Stanley Robinson

A mammal never forgets a bad scare; and they were mammals.

The people are suffering. Relieving people's poverty ought to be handled as though one were rescuing them from fire, or saving them from drowning. One cannot hesitate.

it looked like the great heat wave would be like mass shootings in the United States— mourned by all, deplored by all, and then immediately forgotten or superseded by the next one, until they came in a daily drumbeat and became the new normal.

Their position seems to be that if they're going to die then the world must die with them. This is clearly a manifestation of narcissism, and has been named the Götterdämmerung Syndrome.

If you can't afford housing then the right to vote is a bad joke.

no one knows why things happen, you see? Anything could follow from anything. Even real history tells us nothing.

Memory is a haunting.

It was a mistake to speak one's mind at any time, unless it perfectly matched your political purpose; and it never did.

When Reinhold Messner returned from the first solo climb of Everest, he was severely dehydrated, and utterly exhausted; he fell down most of the last part of the descent, and collapsed on the Rongbuk glacier, and he was crawling over it on hands and knees when the woman who was his entire support team reached him; and he looked up at her out of a delirium, and said, "Where are all my friends?

It makes us a thread in a tapestry that has unrolled for centuries before us, and will unroll for centuries after us. We're midway through the loom, that's the present, and what we do casts the thread in a particular direction, and the picture of the tapestry changes accordingly. When we begin to to try to make a picture pleasing to us and to those who come after, then perhaps you can say that we have seized history.

People didn't understand that true intimacy did not consist of sexual intercourse, which could be done with strangers and in a state of total alienation; intimacy consisted of talking for hours about what was most important in one's life.

I know." She sighed. "We'll all say that. We'll all go on and make the place safe. Roads, cities. New sky, new soil. Until it's all some kind of Siberia or Northwest Territories, and Mars will be gone and we'll be here, and we'll wonder why we feel so empty. Why when we look at the land we can never see anything but our own faces.

Over the years we saw what worked and refined our methods. Violence didn't work. Numbers did. That's the secret, in case you are looking for the secret to resisting an imperial power, which was what we were doing through those years. Non-violent resistance of the total population, or as much of it as you can get. That's what works.

Easier to destroy the world than to change capitalism even one little bit.

When obsessives are given their object of desire, what do they feel? It was hard to say, really. In a sense their lives were ending; yet something else, some other life, had finally, finally begun…. Filled with so many emotions at once, it was impossible not to be confused; it was an interference pattern, some feelings cancelled, others reinforced.

Enough is as good as a feast. And it's when everyone is equal that your kids are safest.

Life is complex, and entropy is real.

All their love had been a way of fixing time, each embrace a moment's touch of the eternal, because the caress preserves.

We like to blame life for the problems we make, We threaten to change, but it's always a fake; We bitch and moan that everything's wrong, Then we get right back to getting along.

Efficiency was just a measurement of how fast money moved from the poor to the rich. We prefer the opposite of efficiency, which is to say, justice.

If you don't act on it, it wasn't a true feeling

No one cares about books, that's why you can write anything you want in them.

It's amazing how little you need to keep starving people strung along.

In games there are rules, but in life the rules keep changing. You could put your bishop out there to mate the other guy's king, and he could lean down and whisper in your bishop's ear, and suddenly it's playing for him, and moving like a rook. And you're fucked.