Quotes from Kim Stanley Robinson

This was perhaps the evolutionary usefulness of the elderly, Bao had concluded: to give the young some kind of psychic shield from reality, putting them under a description which allowed them to ignore the fact that age and death would come to them too, and could come early and out of sequence.

Slow is not the same as deficient. It's just slow. A glacier is slow too, but it gets there, and nothing stops it.

It was a whiny culture, we were finding.

we all began female, and always had both sexual hormones in us. We always had masculine and feminine behavioral traits, which we had to train into gender-appropriate behaviors, even though they were traits that everyone has. We selectively encouraged or repressed traits, so for most of our history we have reinforced gender. But in our deepest selves we were always both.

We have come a long way, we have a long way to go. In between we are somewhere.

You have to fight not only against what you hate, but for what you love, you see?

Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. Money, n. A blessing that is of no advantage to us excepting when we part with it. —Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

The outdoors is what you must pass through in order to get from your apartment into a taxicab. said Fran Lebowitz

good is accomplished against the immense black-hole gravity of greed and fear.

It would take 2,000 Vietnam Memorials to list the [Twentieth] century's war dead.

The sand squeaked underfoot as she toed it. She looked more closely: dark grains of basalt, mixed with minute seashell fragments, and a variety of colorful pebbles, some of them no doubt brecciated fragments of the Hellas impact itself. She lifted her eyes to the hills west of the sea, black under the sun. The bones of things stuck out everywhere. Waves broke in swift lines on the beach, and she walked over the sand toward her friends, in the wind, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars.

what has mattered are the moments of exposure to every life, when habit is no longer enough, and choices have to be made. That's when everyone becomes a great man, for a moment; and the choices made in those moments, which come all too frequently, then combine to make history.

It is fucking crazy to hold on to one moment and say that's the moment that was pure and sacred, and it can only be like that, and I'll kill you if you try to change anything.

A hundred times I have thought: New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times: it is a beautiful catastrophe. —Le

Desire is life trying to continue to be life. All living things desire, bacteria feel desire. Life is wanting.

So that human beings were miraculous indeed - conscious creators, walking this new world like fresh young gods, wielding immense alchemical powers. So that anyone Michel met on Mars he regarded curiously, wondering as he looked at their often innocuous exteriors what kind of new Paracelsus or Isaac of Holland stood before him, and whether they would turn lead to gold, or cause rocks to blossom.

Maya felt the turbulent maelstrom of emotions inside her, stirred by all she had seen on her circumnavigation, by all that had happened and all that was going to happen... ah, the floods within her, the flash floods in her mind! If only she could accomplish the same yoking of her spirit that they had with this aquifer - drain it, control it, make it sane. But the hydrostatic pressures were so intense, the outbreaks when they came so fierce. No pipeline could hold it.

Consciousness is the hard problem.

So now as always you could get AAA ratings, not for subprime mortgages, obviously bad, but for submarine mortgages, clearly much better! And the fact that all submarine properties were in some sense extremely subprime was not mentioned except as one aspect of the very lucrative risks involved.

If you want to write a novel about our world now, you'd better write science fiction, or you will be doing some kind of inadvertent nostalgia piece; you will lack depth, miss the point, and remain confused.

Fuck Margaret Thatcher, I said when I could catch my breath. And I say it again now: fuck Margaret Thatcher, and fuck every idiot who thinks that way. I can take them all to a place where they will eat those words or die of thirst. Because when the taps run dry, society becomes very real.

Best to keep running. Run in the same way one would run on the hunt, just as hard and steady, just as long. Indeed given what was at stake it made sense to go much longer than when on the hunt. Run right through his second wind, run until the rare and elusive third wind filled him, then run some more.

Saint George, a social terrarium in which the men think they are living in a Mormon polygamy, while the women consider it a lesbian world with a small percentage of male lesbians

I consider my novels, amongst many other things, to be my political activism. I'm interested in portraying futures where there are more cooperative, altruistic, post-capitalist systems that are working well.