Robert Charles Wilson citations (134 citations, Page 3)

Robert Charles Wilson: 134 citations0 J'aime

Robert Charles Wilson: Citations en anglais

“Life invented it first, Zoe thought, like so many other things. Like eyes: Turning photon impacts into neurochemical events with such subtlety that a frog can target a fly and a man can admire a rose.”

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Robert Charles Wilson livre Bios

Source: Bios (1999), Chapter 25 (p. 194)

“All the brands and flavors of Big Salvation. At the last minute we would devise a technological fix and save ourselves. Or: the Hypotheticals were benevolent beings who would turn the planet into a peaceable kingdom. Or: God would rescue us all, or at least the true believers among us. Or. Or. Or.
Big Salvation. It was a honeyed lie. A paper lifeboat, even if we were killing ourselves trying to cling to it. It wasn’t the Spin that had mutilated my generation. It was the lure and price of Big Salvation.”

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Robert Charles Wilson livre Spin

Source: Spin (2005), p. 340

“I loved Molly. Or at least I told myself I did. Or, if what I felt for her was not love, it was at least a plausible imitation, a convincing substitute.”

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Robert Charles Wilson livre Spin

Source: Spin (2005), p. 248

“There’s no point living if you can’t, at least occasionally, live.”

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Robert Charles Wilson livre The Chronoliths

Source: The Chronoliths (2001), Chapter 18 (p. 224)

“She gave me a disdainful look. “Please don’t make facile judgments about things you don’t understand.””

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Robert Charles Wilson livre Vortex

Source: Vortex (2011), Chapter 2 (p. 33)

“Sometimes the conscience makes demands that are non-negotiable. Courage has nothing to do with it. We weren’t here because we were brave. We were here because we had to be here.”

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Robert Charles Wilson livre The Chronoliths

Source: The Chronoliths (2001), Chapter 15 (p. 189)

“I suppose the pursuit of fashion has always carried a price, monetary or otherwise.”

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Robert Charles Wilson livre Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), p. 234

“I suppose he could have said this more gently, but what would be the point?”

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Robert Charles Wilson livre The Chronoliths

Source: The Chronoliths (2001), Chapter 15 (p. 189)

“The awful thing about lying was that it became a habit, then a reflex, as automatic as the blinking of the eyes or the voiding of the bowels. Lying was the Terrestrial disease, his mother used to say.”

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Robert Charles Wilson livre Bios

Source: Bios (1999), Chapter 20 (p. 168)

“It was sad but completely understandable. Ten billion human beings without any cortical or limbic augmentation had simply acted to maximize their individual well-being. They hadn’t given much thought to long-term consequences, but how could they? They had no reliable mechanism by which they could think or act collectively. Blaming those people for the death of the ecosphere made as much sense as blaming water molecules for a tsunami.”

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Robert Charles Wilson livre Vortex

Source: Vortex (2011), Chapter 10 (pp. 126-127)

“Guilford thought he knew what science was. It was nothing more than curiosity…tempered by humility, disciplined with patience.
Science meant looking—a special kind of looking. Looking especially hard at the things you didn’t understand. Looking at the stars, say, and not fearing them, not worshiping them, just asking questions, finding the question that would unlock the door to the next question and the question beyond that.”

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Robert Charles Wilson livre Darwinia

Prologue (pp. 10-11)
Darwinia (1998)

“Sandra had spent her days rendering pass/fail verdicts over troubled minds, applying tests most functional adults easily passed. Is the subject oriented to time and place? Does the subject understand the consequences of his actions? 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.”

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Robert Charles Wilson livre Vortex

Source: Vortex (2011), Chapter 1 (p. 16)

“I gather we’re not the most craven species in the galaxy, but we’re not the most angelic by a long shot.”

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Robert Charles Wilson livre Darwinia

Source: Darwinia (1998), Chapter 25 (p. 211)

“There’s no drug that’ll make a stupid man smart.”

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Robert Charles Wilson livre Axis

Source: Axis (2007), Chapter 6 (p. 81)

“Evolution can’t be predicted, Julian used to tell me; it’s a scattershot business; it fires, but it doesn’t aim.”

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Robert Charles Wilson livre Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), p. 57

“They allow us access to the experience of the past—the only kind of time machine we are ever likely to have.”

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Robert Charles Wilson livre Memory Wire

Source: Memory Wire (1987), Chapter 18 (p. 160)

“Perpetual peace is a dream,” he said, “as much as we may yearn for it—but war! War is an integral part of God’s ordering of the universe, without which the world would be swamped in selfishness and materialism. War is the very vessel of honor, and who of us could endure a world without the divine folly of honor? That faith is especially true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause he little understands, during a campaign of which he has little notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use. On the field of battle, where a man lives or dies by the caprice of a bullet or the verdict of a bayonet, life is at its best and healthiest.”

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Robert Charles Wilson livre Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), p. 246 (spoken by the tyrannical president Deklan Comstock)

“Times like this, with the wind moving the grass and curling around her like a huge cool hand, Tess felt the world as a second presence, as another person, as if the wind and the grass had voices of their own and she could hear them talking.”

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Robert Charles Wilson livre Blind Lake

Source: Blind Lake (2003), Chapter 2 (p. 23)

“It was possible at last to hear the silence—to appreciate that there was a silence, deep and potent, out there beyond the pretension of the light.”

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Robert Charles Wilson livre The Chronoliths

Source: The Chronoliths (2001), Chapter 23 (p. 272)

“Ziegler said, “You know the story in the Bible, the story of Abraham and Isaac?”
“Of course.”
“God instructs Abraham to offer his son as a sacrifice. Isaac makes it as far as the chopping block before God changes his mind.”
Yes. Jacob had always imagined God a little appalled at Abraham’s willingness to cooperate.
Ziegler said, “What’s the moral of the story?”
“Faith.”
“Hardly,” Ziegler said. “Faith has nothing to do with it. Abraham never doubted the existence of God—how could he? The evidence was ample. His virtue wasn’t faith, it was fealty. He was so simplemindedly loyal that he would commit even this awful, terrible act. He was the perfect foot soldier. The ideal pawn. Abraham’s lesson: fealty is rewarded. Not morality. The fable makes morality contingent. Don’t go around killing innocent people, that is, unless you're absolutely certain God want you to. It’s a lunatic’s credo.
“Isaac, on the other hand, learns something much more interesting. He learns that neither God nor his own father can be trusted. Maybe it makes him a better man than Abraham. Suppose Isaac grows up and fathers a child of his own, and God approaches him and makes the same demand. One imagines Isaac saying, ’No. You can take him if you must, but I won’t slaughter my son for you.’ He’s not the good and faithful servant his father was. But he is, perhaps, a more wholesome human being.””

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Robert Charles Wilson

The Fields of Abraham (pp. 21-22)
The Perseids and Other Stories (2000)

“We contrast the urban and the natural, but that’s a contemporary myth. We’re animals, after all; our cities are organic products, fully as “natural” (whatever that word really means) as a termite hill or a rabbit warren. But how much more interesting: how much more complex, dressed in the intricacies and exfoliations of human culture, simple patterns iterated into infinite variation. And full of secrets, secrets beyond counting.”

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Robert Charles Wilson

The Inner Inner City (p. 74)
The Perseids and Other Stories (2000)

“Here was the real horror, Degrandpre thought, this breaking of barriers. Civilization, after all, was the making of divisions, of walls and fences to parse the chaotic wild into ordered cells of human imagination. Wilderness invades the garden and reason is overthrown.”

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Robert Charles Wilson livre Bios

Source: Bios (1999), Chapter 19 (p. 164)

“These movies belonged to the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—that period of great, unsustainable, and hedonistic prosperity, driven by the burning of Earth’s reserves of perishable oil, which culminated in the False Tribulation, and the wars, and the plagues, and the painful dwindling of inflated populations to more reasonable numbers.”

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Robert Charles Wilson livre Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), p. 29

“He’s exactly what she wants. He’s the last thing she needs.”

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Robert Charles Wilson livre Spin

Source: Spin (2005), p. 72

“Fortune had done him few favors in the past, and he wasn’t sure he trusted it.”

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Robert Charles Wilson livre Axis

Source: Axis (2007), Chapter 7 (pp. 92-93)

“Time is a vastness,” he said finally. “We tend to underestimate it.”

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Robert Charles Wilson livre A Bridge of Years

Source: A Bridge of Years (1991), Chapter 13 (p. 244)

““But you're a Philosopher!” Julian exclaimed at one point. “This is Philosophy, not Religion, since you rule out supernatural beings—you know that as well as I do!”
“I suppose it is Philosophy, looked at from one angle,” Stepney conceded. “But there’s no money in Philosophy, Julian. Religion is far more lucrative as a career.””

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Robert Charles Wilson livre Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), p. 338

“A lot of people have made political careers out of religious piety and the fear of foreigners, but that won’t last. Not enough foreigners or miracles to sustain the crisis.”

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Robert Charles Wilson livre Darwinia

Source: Darwinia (1998), Chapter 7 (p. 77)

“The attacking piece displaces its victim. The vanquished piece leaves the plane of the board entirely. But it does not, in a higher sense, cease to exist.”

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Robert Charles Wilson

The Fields of Abraham (p. 37)
The Perseids and Other Stories (2000)

“And death?
I don’t fear death.
I dread the absence of it.”

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Robert Charles Wilson

Divided by Infinity (p. 195)
The Perseids and Other Stories (2000)

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