Top 60 Robert Charles Wilson Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Stupid people do stupid things, but people who are smart enough can do something really stupid.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

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

— Robert Charles Wilson

3. “We’re all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we’re seldom formally introduced.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

4. “We’re as ephemeral as raindrops. We all fall, and we all land somewhere.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

5. “Ars moriendi ars vivendi est: the art of dying is the art of living.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

6. “This would have been less annoying had it been untrue.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

7. “You never stop being a parent, Adam, no matter how old or wise your child becomes you’ll see.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

8. “We’ll do what life always does defy expectations.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

9. “Are you just a car salesman or are you a poet too?” “I’ve never been accused of poetry before.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

10. “I suppose every decade gets the music it deserves.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

11. “Along with a dozen other students I had dissected a human cadaver and sorted its contents by size, color, function, and weight. There was nothing pleasant about the experience. Its only consolation was its truth and its only virtue was its utility.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

12. “Some things are taken away from you, some you leave behind and some you carry with you, world without end.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

13. “I won’t put my ignorance on an altar and call it God. It feels like idolatry, like the worst kind of idolatry.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

14. “I don’t believe money is evil, but it can be terribly corrosive.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

15. “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.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

16. “I believed there were no Hypotheticals in the sense of consciously acting agents conscious entities. There was only the process. The needles of evolution, endlessly knitting.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

17. “Understanding is better than ignorance. Ignorance, unlike life, unlike narrative, is static. Understanding implies a forward motion, thus the possibility of change.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

18. “I understand so very little. But I am not afraid to look: I am a good observer at last. My eyes are open, and I am not afraid.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

19. “It’s partly the Southernization of America, in that the Southern working-class version of redneck is becoming the national version, and it’s good-natured, it has humor and, in some ways, it’s a performance.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

20. “Nobody wants to conduct an autopsy on a dead saint.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

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

— Robert Charles Wilson

22. “The Mysteries are the Mysteries, and ultimately personal maybe the most personal thing in the universe. Evangelism, in my opinion, is a failure of the imagination. Beware of prophets: the best visions are the ones they leave in the desert.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

23. “Personally, I don’t believe in anything more supernatural than what you read about in the Bible, and I only believe that one day out of seven.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

24. “We spent a lot of time discussing cosmology first. I think that was your father’s unique way of evaluating people. You can tell a lot about a person, he once said, by the way they look at the stars.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

25. “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.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

26. “Is there any evidence to the contrary? I don’t need certainty in order to act on a well-founded suspicion.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

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

— Robert Charles Wilson

28. “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.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

29. “Ecstasy hates company.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

30. “Promises were like bad checks, easy to write and hard to cash.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

31. “I would confront the thieves, I thought, and the self-evident justice of my case would cause them to crumble before me. I don’t know why I expected such extravagant results from the application of mere justice. That kind of calculation is seldom borne out by worldly events.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

32. “Does it strike you, Mr. Keller, that we live every day in the science fiction of our youth?”

— Robert Charles Wilson

33. “Children wear their natures like brightly-colored clothes; that’s why they lie so transparently. Adulthood is the art of deceit.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

34. “You must not make the mistake of thinking that because nothing lasts, nothing matters.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

35. “John Scalzi is a fresh and appealing new voice, and Old Man’s War is classic SF seen from a modern perspective – a fast-paced tour of a daunting, hostile universe.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

36. “Do you want to tell the truth, or do you want to tell a story?”

— Robert Charles Wilson

37. “What we cannot remember, we must rediscover.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

38. “For such people the consummate act of moral clarity was a lynching or a suicide bombing, a fatwa or a pogrom. And they were ascendant now, rising like dark stars over a terminal landscape .”

— Robert Charles Wilson

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

— Robert Charles Wilson

40. “Average people seldom talked about anything interesting and often hurt each other savagely.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

41. “To capture the pawn, threaten the queen.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

42. “I thought of Einstein, and his insistence that no particular point of view was more privileged than any other: in other words his ‘general relativity’, and its claim that the answer to the question ‘What is real?” begins with the question ‘Where are you standing?”

— Robert Charles Wilson

43. “I appreciated her bluntness. Maybe it came with her sudden sobriety. Here she was back in the brightly lit world she had been avoiding for twenty years, and it was exactly as awful as she remembered it.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

44. “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.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

45. “If I am an agnostic, Calyxa, it’s because I’m also a realist.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

46. “The world is what it is and won’t be bargained with.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

47. “One doesn’t have to understand in order to look. One has to look, in order to understand.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

48. “It was the kind of experience, Molly said, that would grow calluses on an angel’s ass.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

49. “When people come to understand how big the Universe is and how short a human life is, their hearts cry out. Sometimes it’s a shout of joy. But for most of us it’s a cry of terror. The terror of extinction, the terror of meaninglessness. Our hearts cry out. Maybe to God, or maybe just to break the silence”.”

— Robert Charles Wilson

50. “What had been released into the desert vacuum and starry oases of the galaxy was the inexorable logic of reproduction and natural selection. What followed was parasitism, predation, symbiosis, interdependency chaos, complexity, life.”

— Robert Charles Wilson