Quotes from Robert Charles Wilson

A species that runs into sustainability limits before it stabilizes its population is probably doomed. Massive starvation, failed technology, and a planet so depleted from the first bloom of civilization that it lacks the means to rebuild.

The world is full of surprises. We're all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we're seldom formally introduced.

teleological engineering.

I drew on Under a Green Sky and The Medea Hypothesis, by the reliably pessimistic Peter Ward

Consciousness, like matter, like energy, is preserved.

The needles of evolution, endlessly knitting.

God, he asserted, was not contained in any Book, but was a Voice, which every human being could hear (and which most of us chose to ignore). The common name of that voice was Conscience; but it was a God by any reasonable definition, Stepney claimed.

Gods, the pamphlets asserted, were not supernatural beings, but tenuously living things, like ethereal plants, that evolved in concert with the human species. We were simply their medium—our brains and flesh the soil in which they sprouted and grew.

Brian took her hand a final time, then turned and walked away. Lise sat at the table a while longer. The cooling air from the patio was pleasant. The stars were coming out. Mahmud poured coffee from a silver carafe. What we cannot remember, we must rediscover. "I'm sorry—did you say something?" "I said, it's getting dark." Mahmud smiled. "It's these sunsets. Seems like they go on forever.

H]e dreamed things for which he had no words.

The view was in an unearthly way beautiful, but it was also unendurable. It implied too much

recalled Mark Twain's reply to a similar question: Heaven, for the climate. Hell, for the company.

Amazing, I thought, how busily we had turned ourselves into people who didn't know one another very well.

the vices and wickedness of the Secular Era, some of which still lingered, he said, in the cities of the East – irreligiosity, scepticism, occultism, depravity. And I thought of the ideas I had so casually imbibed from Julian and (indirectly) from Sam, some of which I had even begun to believe: Einsteinism, Darwinism, space travel …

There is something mournful and uneasy about waking up late at night on a moving train. The wheels clicked a bony rhythm, the engine growled like a distant Leviathan, and from time to time the whistle sounded a cry so lonesome it seemed to speak for the whole wide moonless night.

Our truest and best American antiquity, as the Dominion History of the Union insisted, was the nineteenth century, whose household virtues and modest industries we had been forced by circumstance to imperfectly restore, whose skills were unfailingly practical, and whose literature was often useful and improving.

N]ot my name, my secret idea of myself.

don't know how to fix it. I don't have spare parts. Or the right tools. I'm not even sure what the right tools are.

We live at a certain level of abstraction; we interact as bodies, not cell colonies.

Superstition...is what we call the miracles we don't approve of.

She had made it clear, as had Damian, that although the marriage solemnized a real commitment, it didn't mean she and I were finished. But we saw each other far less often than we once had. And to be honest, I was a little uncomfortable about sleeping with a married woman. Not because the relationship was immoral but because it was brutally asymmetrical.

Grant us the courage to accept the bounty You have placed before us this and every other day. Amen.

The water in the ocean is like the water in a swimming pool, but you can't swim across it.

The gadget's trivial. It's the network that's useful. Not the gadget but the network.