Top 80 Robin Sloan Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The menu charmed me, and as a result, my night, and my life, bent off on a different track.”

— Robin Sloan

2. “All the secrets of the world worth knowing are hiding in plain site.”

— Robin Sloan

3. “There is no immortality that is not built on friendship and work done with care. All the secrets in the world worth knowing are hiding in plain sight.”

— Robin Sloan

4. “Your life must be an open city, with all sorts of ways to wander in.”

— Robin Sloan

5. “Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines – it’s hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.”

— Robin Sloan

6. “Kat bought a New York Times but couldn’t figure out how to operate it, so now she’s fiddling with her phone.”

— Robin Sloan

7. “A clerk and a ladder and warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time.”

— Robin Sloan

8. “Lost in the shadows of the shelves, I almost fall off the ladder. I am exactly halfway up. The floor of the bookstore is far below me, the surface of a planet I’ve left behind.”

— Robin Sloan

9. “I walk alone in the darkness and wonder how a person would begin to determine the circumference of the earth. I have no idea. I’d probably just google it.”

— Robin Sloan

10. “I’ve never listened to an audiobook before, and I have to say it’s a totally different experience. When you read a book, the story definitely takes place in your head. When you listen, it seems to happen in a little cloud all around it, like a fuzzy knit cap pulled down over your eyes.”

— Robin Sloan

11. “You know, I’m really starting to think the whole world is just a patchwork quilt of crazy little cults, all with their own secret spaces, their own records, their own rules.”

— Robin Sloan

12. “Imagination runs out. But it makes sense, right? We probably just imagine things based on what we already know, and we run out of analogies in the thirty-first century.”

— Robin Sloan

13. “I feel a little whirl of dislocation – the trademark sensation of the world being more closely knit together than you expected.”

— Robin Sloan

14. “Our books still do not require batteries. But I am no fool. It is a slender advantage.”

— Robin Sloan

15. “Let me give you some advice: make friends with a millionaire when he’s a friendless sixth-grader.”

— Robin Sloan

16. “Here’s a thing I believe about people my age: we are the children of Hogwarts, and more than anything, we just want to be sorted.”

— Robin Sloan

17. “I sit up straight and do the first thing a person is supposed to do in an emergency, which is send a text message.”

— Robin Sloan

18. “Thank you, Teobaldo. You are my greatest friend. This has been the key to everything.”

— Robin Sloan

19. “Then: I google “time-series visualization” and start work on a new version of my model, thinking that maybe I can impress her with a prototype. I am really into the kind of girl you can impress with a prototype.”

— Robin Sloan

20. “This is no library. This is the Batcave.”

— Robin Sloan

21. “Baking, by contrast, was solving the same problem over and over again, because every time, the solution was consumed. I mean, really: chewed and digested. Thus, the problem was ongoing. Thus, the problem was perhaps the point.”

— Robin Sloan

22. “The internet: always proving that you’re not quite as special as you suspected.”

— Robin Sloan

23. “It was a fungal party hellscape.”

— Robin Sloan

24. “America pays defense contractors to build aircraft carriers. Google pays brilliant programmers to do whatever the hell they want.”

— Robin Sloan

25. “Neel takes a sharp breath and I know exactly what it means. It means: I have waited my whole life to walk through a secret passage built into a bookshelf.”

— Robin Sloan

26. “The thinnest tendrils of dawn are creeping in from the east. People in New York are softly starting to tweet.”

— Robin Sloan

27. “Your parents are weirdos, in the best possible way. They do not celebrate birthdays; never in your life have you received a present on the tenth of December. Instead, you are given books on the days that their authors were born.”

— Robin Sloan

28. “What if, you know – what if hanging out with Griffo Gerritszoon wasn’t always that great? What if he was weird and dreamy? What if the best part of him was the shapes he could make with metal? That part of him really is immortal. It’s as immortal as anything’s going to get.”

— Robin Sloan

29. “I loved The Chronicles of Narnia. I loved The Chronicles of Prydain. Basically, ‘Chronicles of’ – I was in!”

— Robin Sloan

30. “Sometimes, you’re stuck with a system too complicated to model completely.”

— Robin Sloan

31. “Compaq Lois spoke. Her voice was not kind or coddling, but stern. “Do you like your job?” My hesitation answered for me. “I know I have strong opinions about everything – I can’t help it, I do – but this one’s the strongest. I waited too long to get out of that office. Much too long. I weep for those years.” The seriousness of her statement quieted the room.”

— Robin Sloan

32. “So I switch to my MacBook and make my rounds: news sites, blogs, tweets. I scroll back to find the conversations that happened without me during the day. When every single piece of media you consume is time-shifted, does that mean it’s actually you that’s time-shifted?”

— Robin Sloan

33. “Books of silver; books of bone; and yet the strangest thing you see in all your years at Galvanic is a boy in a ski-mask, sitting in a basement, using a computer.”

— Robin Sloan

34. “These days, the phone only carries bad news. It’s all “your student loan is past due” and “your uncle Chris is in the hospital.” If it’s anything fun or exciting, like an invitation to a party or a secret project in the works, it will come through the internet.”

— Robin Sloan

35. “I have come to believe that food is history of the deepest kind. Everything we eat tells a tale of ingenuity and creation, domination and injustice-and does so more vividly than any other artifact, any other medium.”

— Robin Sloan

36. “Her home is the burrow of a bibliophile hobbit – low-ceilinged, close-walled, and brimming over with books.”

— Robin Sloan

37. “There are plenty of people who, you know – people who still like the smell of books.”

— Robin Sloan

38. “Why do organizations need to mark everything with their insignia? It’s like a dog peeing on every tree. Google is the same way. So was NewBagel. Using.”

— Robin Sloan

39. “Its a museum’s job to keep things for posterity,“Tabitha sniffs. “We have a temperature-controlled storage unit full of Christmas sweaters.”

— Robin Sloan

40. “He’s like a storybook spirit, a little djinn or something, except instead of air or water his element is imagination.”

— Robin Sloan

41. “The suburban mind cannot comprehend the emergent complexity of a New York sidewalk.”

— Robin Sloan

42. “It’s always new and astonishing when it’s yours.”

— Robin Sloan

43. “There is no immortality that is not built on friendship and work done with care. All the secrets in the world worth knowing are hiding in plain sight. It takes forty-one seconds to climb a ladder three stories tall. It’s not easy to imagine the year 3012, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. We have new capabilities now – strange powers we’re still getting used to. The mountains are a message from Aldrag the Wyrm-Father. Your life must be an open city, with all sorts of ways to wander in.”

— Robin Sloan

44. “There is no immortality that is not built on friendship and work done with care.”

— Robin Sloan

45. “Magic is not the only power in this world.”

— Robin Sloan

46. “Typographers are designers; designers are my people.”

— Robin Sloan

47. “I can’t eat pizza. If we actually end up with a pizza, it’s going to be your responsibility to consume it. Do not let me have any. Even if I ask for some.” He pauses. “I’ll probably ask for some.”

— Robin Sloan

48. “But I kept at it with the help-wanted ads. My standards were sliding swiftly. At first I had insisted I would only work at a company with a mission I believed in. Then I thought maybe it would be fine as long as I was learning something new. After that I decided it just couldn’t be evil. Now I was carefully delineating my personal definition of evil.”

— Robin Sloan

49. “If this sounds impressive to you, you’re over thirty.”

— Robin Sloan

50. “There had to be a scale somewhere – the scale of stars, the scale of far-off cosmic super-beings – upon which we ourselves, we humans with our cities and bridges and subterranean markets, would look like the lactobacilli and the yeast.”

— Robin Sloan