Quotes from Robert Charles Wilson

the question… as always, the question is how to look at the sun without being blinded.

Suddenly I wanted the earlier version back, but there was no retrieving it. When I blurred the lines to soften them it was as if she began to disappear.

I had an idea that sobriety was a weapon. I thought it would give me an advantage over my enemies. I wasn't sober for moral reasons-I was sober for the same reason a man carries a concealed pistol.

You don't understand a lie, Molly said as we paralleled an ancient boardwalk gone white with salt, until you understand the motivation behind it.

So," I said, "does this make us water-brothers?" Wun Ngo Wen looked puzzled. Jason laughed out loud.

I made a fatuous remark about how badly people behave when they're frightened

And don't you dare say you love me, because I know that's not true. You don't know the difference between being in love and conducting yourself like you're in love. It's nice you picked me, but it could have been anybody, and believe me, Tyler, it would have been just as disappointing, one way or another.

Vanished children, I can't think where I lost them...

We're all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we're seldom formally introduced.

But if she could give the same test to humanity as a whole, Sandra thought, the outcome would be very much in doubt. Subject is confused and often self-destructive. Subject pursues short-term gratification at the expense of his own well-being.

He opened his eyes and the irises were newly discolored, as if their pale uniform blue had been spattered with gold paint. He looked at her directly and he smiled.

Carol's life had been so incomplete: a verb without an object

They want to touch God.

But he could have been lying." "I don't know that he ever lied, Tyler. He was just a little stingy with the truth.

As for the charm and innocence I hoped to find -- it exists, it really does, but consider what it's buried in. Racism. Misogyny and homophobia so absolute as to be nearly universal. Hatred of the Irish, the Italians, the Chinese -- not that many of them are seen in these parts

Finch refused to discuss these ideas and didn't brook criticism from his colleagues, much less from a mere photographer. What must it be like, Guilford wondered, to have such a baroque architecture crammed inside one's skull? Such a strange cathedral, so well buttressed, so well defended?

But it was my first evidence that Diane lived in a world even bigger than the Big House, a world where grief and joy moved as ponderously as tides, with the weight of an ocean behind them.

One of the tenants here has a tumor on his face. It covers most of his right eye. Where I come from, it would have been treated and removed. So I find myself thinking, what if I get sick? Something as simple as appendicitis could kill me. I've had all the shots, but what happens when the vaccines wear off? As for the charm and innocence I hoped to find -- it exists, it really does, but consider what it's buried in. Racism. Misogyny and homophobia so absolute as to be nearly universal.

Less than half an hour passed before he buzzed her from the security gate in the lobby.

Some researchers had even concluded that the effort to understand the brain was necessarily doomed—that consciousness cannot comprehend consciousness any more than a box may contain itself. "This

The hotel balconies were mobbed. The beach was mobbed. A thousand heads and lenses swiveled in the same direction. Estimates later put the crowd in and around the Cape at nearly two million. According to police reports, more than a hundred wallets were lifted that night. There were two fatal stabbings, fifteen attempted assaults, and one premature labor. (The child, a four-pound girl, was delivered on a trestle table at the International House of Pancakes in Cocoa Beach.)

You can't really comprehend events like that, I thought. You can only endure them.

We call people rats, who desert a sinking ship; but in some cases the rat has the wisdom of the situation.

And even if by chance he were to utter the perfect truth, he would himself not know it, for all is but a woven web of guesses.