Quotes from Kim Stanley Robinson

The door opened to reveal something like the opposite of Inspector Genette: a very big man. Prognathous, callipygous, steatopygous, exophthalmos—toad, newt, frog—even the very words were ugly.

I was old the day I was born and I'll be young the day I die.

The state monopoly on violence had probably been a good idea while it lasted, but no one could believe it would ever come back.

What's good is what's good for the land. Instead of working for profit, we do whatever is good for the land. Taking care of the land takes better care of the people over the long haul.

Words blur at the borders, fuzz into other words, not just in big clouds of connotation around the edges of the word, but right there in the heart of denotation itself.

If our government tries to back the banks instead of us, then we elect a different government. We pretend that democracy is real, and that will make it real.

You will only repeat the socialist catastrophe!" Vlad shrugged. "Don't be too hasty to judge that period. The socialist countries were under assault from capitalism without and corruption within, and no system could survive that. We must not throw the baby socialism out with the Stalinist bathwater, or we lose many concepts of obvious fairness that we need. Earth is in the grip of the system that defeated socialism, and it is clearly an irrational and destructive hierarchy.

Dent recognized it; the intermezzo before the last movement of De Bruik's Human Biology. The finale of the symphony was a standard concert opener in the outer worlds. Soon the crackling of superamplified muscle contractions and the rush of adrenaline into the bloodstream announced the shift to the finale, and the crowd cheered wildly; Dent could feel his blood surging through him—

All things remain in God. Even if there was no God. All things remain in something or other. Some kind of eternity outside time.

It is a long time ago. So many lives ago--I get them all confused, don't you?

Exergasia' means 'use of different phrases to express the same idea,' 'synathroesmus' means 'accumulation by enumeration,' and 'incrementum' means 'piling up points to make an argument.' So listing them does all three, yes?

hope to do some good, no matter how fucked up you are.

The brain is a funny animal," he muttered

I worked hard to create such nests of habit, as everybody does, for without habit life would be too abrasive and too long to live.

No more fucking around, reality has struck

America also stands for the melting pot. The idea of the melting pot. It was the place where people could come from anywhere and be a part of it. Such was the theory. There are lessons there for us.

And with our work," John continued, "we are carving out a new social order and the next step in the human story"—i.e., the latest variant in primate dominance dynamics.

There was so much more going on than any one person could know, reality was so much bigger than the self, that it was alarming to contemplate. This explained the error: one felt the vastness and shrunk in on oneself like a snail's horns, instinctively trying to protect one's mind. And yet there was no real harm in it, this contact with the larger reality.

During the day he dropped by his storage locker in Encinitas and got some gear, and that night he parked the van on La Jolla Farms Road and walked out onto the bluff between Scripps and Blacks canyons. This plateau, owned by UCSD, had been left empty, a rare thing. In fact it might be the only one left.

Southern California spring-time, when things bloomed, occurred from November through February, corresponding to the rainy season. Summer's equivalent would be March through May; and the dry brown autumn was June through October. Leaving no good equivalent for winter proper.

Buddhism spreads by people converting out of their own wish for peace and right action. But power condenses around those willing to use force.

You never see anything like it where you live, this I can guarantee. Not one person in 10,000 lives in a place where the stars are visible like they are in the Sierra at night. Dark skies (meaning away from cities), 10,000 feet above sea level: that means thousands of stars. Watch for half an hour and see several meteors streak across the sky, sometimes at cosmological speeds, faster than anything you'll ever see by day.

When memory fails to contain us we must love the past more than ever, to hold it to us—or else the present becomes a meaningless blaze of color and sound, in which no two humans, great elongate beings, will be able to do more than touch at their very lips, their spatial selves—no one will ever truly understand another. To love the past is to become fully human.

Life—what was it? So deep and important and full of feeling, so crucial, then suddenly just a blink, a mayfly moment and gone. Nothing really, in the grander scheme; and no grander scheme either. No. A vertiginous perch, the bedside chair in a hospice.