Quotes from Kim Stanley Robinson

history was a wave that moved through time slightly faster than an individual life did, so that even when people had lived only to seventy or eighty, they had been behind the wave by the time they died;

And some part of him saw it was going to be all right. the heart is pleased by one thing after another.

Strange how one remembered faces until you tried to look at them in your mind, when they turned away from you.

A square object was visible at a greater distance than a round object of the same area.

This explained the world they lived in; the murderers were willing to kill to get their way. In a fight between sociopathic sick wounded angry fucked-up wicked people, and all the rest of them, not just the good and the brave but the ordinary and weak, the sheep who just wanted to get by, the fuckers always won.

Bold didn't know what he felt, it changed minute by minute.

Not that it would be wasting my time to chat in a bar with a good-looking woman, obviously, but I wanted to know as much as possible going in, because under the impact of a woman's direct gaze I am likely to suffer a mind wipe.

I don't know how I'll be as a shaman. I'll find out when I try it. You both know me. You've known me since before we even had names. I can't travel in my dreams, or above the sky. There aren't any spirits that talk to me or through me. I can't sing the songs. I can't help people who are sick. But I'll tell you this, and he raised his right forefinger before them and seized them with his eyes: —I can paint that fucking cave.

Maybe that's what a marriage is," Mqaret said. "Whistling together. Some kind of performance. I mean, not just a conversation, but a performance.

He felt himself dissolving down into the great mass of the mountain, tumbling slowly down through the rock. The mountain mumbled in his ear, I am. With a puff of its cheeks it blew him aloft, threw his atoms out into the sky. They tumbled off on the wind and dispersed to every point of the compass . . .until his body and California were contiguous, united, one. Only his vision remained separate.

Country Future Index. It's an alternative to the GNP measurement, taking into account debt, political stability, environmental health and the like. A useful cross-check on the GNP, and it helps tag countries that could use our help. We identify those, go to them and offer them a massive capital investment, plus political advice, security, whatever they need. In return we take custody of their bioinfrastructure.

That was how humans knew each other. Tiny fractions of their lives intersected or were known in any way to anybody else. It was much like living alone in the universe. Which was strange. A justification for living with friends, for marrying, for sharing rooms and lives as much as possible. Not that this made people truly intimate; but it reduced the sensation of solitude.

The intellect derives from the senses, which are limited, and come from the body. The intellect therefore is also limited, and it can never truly know reality, which is infinite and eternal.

That's why you aren't hearing from anyone out there. That's why the great silence persists. There are many other living intelligences out there, no doubt, but they can't leave their home planets any more than we can, because life is a planetary expression, and can only survive on its home planet." "But

Analogies always deceive more than they reveal; I am no fan of analogies, I do not use them. Even metaphor, that mental operation we use with almost every word we speak, is slippery and deceptive. I always speak as plainly as I can. And yet language, and therefore thought, is a strange and imprecise game of metaphors and analogies, one that we must play to stay alive.

What can I say, friends?" he cried. "This is the thing itself, there are no words for this. This is what words ask for.

for we are all definitely always falling apart, and not massively entrenched in anything at all.

They played chess and Frank won. John laughed. How stupid, he said. What do you mean? Games don't mean anything. Are you sure? Sometimes life seems like a kind of game to me. John shook his head. 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.

Chinese Buddhism was the natural study of reality, and led to feelings of devotion just from noting the daily leaves, the colors of the sky, the animals seen from the corner of the eye.

Happy and angry. Happily angry. Everything, all at once. That's life, boy. You just keep getting fuller, until you burst and Allah takes you and casts your soul into another life later on. And so everything just keeps getting fuller.

You're not a conventional man." "No!" He hooted. "I never claimed to be! Except before certain selection committees of course. A conventional man! Ah, ha ha ha ha ha!—the conventional men get Maya. That is their reward." And he laughed like a wild man.

Possess nothing and be possessed by nothing. Put away what you have in your head, give what you have in your heart. Here a world and there a world, we are seated on the threshold.

And yet the whole meaning of the universe, its beauty, is contained in the consciousness of intelligent life. We are the consciousness of the universe, and our job is to spread that around, to go look at things, to live everywhere we can. It's too dangerous to keep the consciousness of the universe on only one planet, it could be wiped out.

They talked and talked and talked. Twenty-four biomes, ten thousand conversations. Talk talk talk. As they talked, it began to come clear to them that they had no very effective method of governance, when it came to making decisions as a group. Had humans ever had such a thing, they asked themselves, since leaving the savannah? Since congregating in cities? They could not be sure. The histories suggested maybe not.