Quotes from Robert Charles Wilson

Weil said. "Details are scarce, and I'm not a scientist, but it involves a biologically mediated attempt at communicating with the Hypotheticals.

Those are things people say, Tyler. Talking about multilateralism and diplomacy is like saying 'I love you'—it serves to facilitate the fucking.

It was one of those situations where you just say fuck it. Fuck the job, fuck management.

Violence is the great attractor of human history, Dr. Iverson. A force almost as irresistible as gravity.

You don't have to be nice all the time. Get angry once in a while. You're entitled.

Part of waging war is knowing when you're outgunned.

And the strange thing was that it felt absolutely familiar, the curve of her arm under my hand and the weight of her head against my shoulder: not discovered but remembered. She felt the way I had always known she would feel. Even the tang of her fear was familiar.

By the time she reached her apartment in Clear Lake

Ars moriendi ars vivendi est: the art of dying is the art of living. I had read that somewhere in my postgraduate days and remembered it as I sat at his side. Jason died as he had lived, in the heroic pursuit of understanding. His gift to the world would be the fruits of that understanding, not hoarded but freely distributed.

Maybe this was what the media was calling "desperate euphoria"—the we're-all-doomed-but-anything-can-happen feeling that had begun to peak around the time Wun went public. The end of the world, plus Martians: given that, what was impossible? What was even unlikely? And where did that leave the standard arguments in favor of propriety, patience, virtue, and not rocking the boat?

Its results would be, if anything, greater and more subtle; but its very efficiency—a mere handful of rockets, no clever timing required—failed as drama.

Heaven, for the climate. Hell, for the company.

The Hypotheticals took you and they remembered you and eventually they re-created you, and that means the real Turk Findley is as dead and long-gone as the real Allison Pearl. You're a convincing replica, but you were born in a desert with another man's memories—you're no more responsible for that man's sins than I am for Allison's.

No, not sure. But willing. Willing, finally, to lose what might be lost, willing to embrace what might be gained.

If the world doesn't come to an end in the next thirty or forty years,' he said, 'we may be facing disaster.

Turk tried to study the crowd of Fourths, but the light was behind them and they weren't much more than silhouettes.

Reason breeds more monsters than conscience, Mr. Findley.

Turk had once killed a man, and he had built a life on the foundation of that guilt.

A man who submits himself wholeheartedly to God might handle them and not be harmed. That was the faith my father had professed. Certainly he trusted God, in his own case, and believed God manifested Himself in the rolled eyes of his congregants and in their babble of incomprehensible tongues. Trust and be saved, was his philosophy. And yet in the end it was the snakes that killed him. I wondered which element of the calculation had ultimately failed him—human faith or divine patience.

Which meant the State Care population was continually rising while its budget remained fixed.

Theoretically, the procedure might be more stable if it was applied to a human fetus in vivo. An unborn child in the womb.

When I blurred the lines to soften them it was as if she began to disappear.

My mom had been a news junkie since the October Event, watching CNN not for pleasure or even information but mainly to reassure herself, the way a Mexican villager might keep an eye on a nearby volcano, hoping not to see smoke.

The easiest kind of prophecy," he said, "is the kind that predicts things that have already happened.