Kim Stanley Robinson > Quotes

“We all have secret lives. The life of excretion; the world of inappropriate sexual fantasies; our real hopes, our terror of death; our experience of shame; the world of pain; and our dreams. No one else knows these lives. Consciousness is solitary. Each person lives in that bubble universe that rests under the skull, alone.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo's Dream

“We will go out into the world and plant gardens and orchards to the horizons, we will build roads through the mountains and across the deserts, and terrace the mountains and irrigate the deserts until there will be garden everywhere, and plenty for all, and there will be no more empires or kingdoms, no more caliphs, sultans, emirs, khans, or zamindars, no more kings or queens or princes, no more quadis or mullahs or ulema, no more slavery and no more usury, no more property and no more taxes, no more rich and no more poor, no killing or maiming or torture or execution, no more jailers and no more prisoners, no more generals, soldiers, armies or navies, no more patriarchy, no more caste, no more hunger, no more suffering than what life brings us for being born and having to die, and then we will see for the first time what kind of creatures we really are.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt

“Economics was like psychology, a pseudoscience trying to hide that fact with intense theoretical hyperelaboration. And gross domestic product was one of those unfortunate measurement concepts, like inches or the British thermal unit, that ought to have been retired long before.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Blue Mars

“It was that sort of sleep in which you wake every hour and think to yourself that you have not been sleeping at all; you can remember dreams that are like reflections, daytime thinking slightly warped.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Icehenge

“Beauty is power and elegance, right action, form fitting function, intelligence, and reasonability. And very often expressed in curves.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

“All the repetitions in the pattern were superficial; the moment was always new. It had to be lived, and then the next moment embraced as it arrived.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Sixty Days and Counting

“Childhood isn't just those years. It's also the opinions you form about them afterward. That's why our childhoods are so long.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“What we need is equality without conformity.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“And in this curious state I had the realization, at the moment of seeing that stranger there, that I was a person like everybody else. That I was known by my actions and words, that my internal universe was unavailable for inspection by others. They didn't know. They didn't know, because I never told them.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Icehenge

“We were outside the world, we didn't even own things -- some clothes. . . . This arrangement resembles the prehistoric way to live, and it therefore feels right to us, because our brains recognize it from 3 millions of years practicing it. In essence our brains grew to their current configuration in response to the realities of that life. So as a result people grow powerfully attached to that kind of life, when they get the chance to live it. It allows you to concentrate your attention on the real work, which means everything that is done to stay alive, to make things, or satisfy one's curiosity, or play. That is utopia.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

“But lies were what people wanted; that was politics.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

“And because we are alive, the universe must be said to be alive. We are its consciousness as well as our own. We rise out of the cosmos and we see its mesh of patterns, and it strikes us as beautiful. And that feeling is the most important thing in all the universe—its culmination, like the color of the flower at first bloom on a wet morning.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“You can't get any movement larger than five people without including at least one fucking idiot.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“Science was many things, Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

“Utopia is the process of making a better world, the name for one path history can take, a dynamic, tumultuous, agonizing process, with no end. Struggle forever.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Pacific Edge

“Beauty is the promise of happiness. And the only happiness is action.
...
Fate is the path of least action.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson

“The intense desire to talk with someone, sharp as any pain; this was what people meant when they talked about love. Or rather; this was what Sax would acknowledge to be love. Just the super-heightened desire to share thoughts. That alone. ”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Blue Mars

“History is a wave that moves through time slightly faster than we do.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson

“I grew up in a utopia, I did. California when I was a child was a child's paradise, I was healthy, well fed, well clothed, well housed. I went to school and there were libraries with all the world in them and after school I played in orange groves and in Little League and in the band and down at the beach and every day was an adventure. . . . I grew up in utopia.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Pacific Edge

“History was like some vast thing that was always over the tight horizon, invisible except in its effects. It was what happened when you weren't looking -- an unknowable infinity of events, which although out of control, controlled everything.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

“And so sometimes when you feel strange, when a pang tugs at your heart or it seems like the moment has already happened- or when you look up in the sky and are surprised at the sight of bright Jupiter between clouds, and everything suddenly seems stuffed with a vast significance-consider that some other person somewhere is entangled with you in time, and is trying to give some push to the situation, some little help to make things better. Then put your shoulder to whatever wheel you have at hand, whatever moment you're in, and push too! Push like Galileo pushed! And together we may crab sideways toward the good.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo's Dream

“So that human beings were miraculous indeed - conscious creators, walking this new world like fresh young gods, wielding immense alchemical powers. So that anyone Michel met on Mars he regarded curiously, wondering as he looked at their often innocuous exteriors what kind of new Paracelsus or Isaac of Holland stood before him, and whether they would turn lead to gold, or cause rocks to blossom. ”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“It seemed to him that nothing would ever be explained, and that all of a sudden each day was slipping away, that time was flying by and they were getting old and nothing would ever come clear.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson

“All their love had been a way of fixing time, each embrace a moment's touch of the eternal, because the caress preserves.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson

“Historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can't grasp the current situation.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

“That's libertarians for you — anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“Every moment an epiphany arrives, and cleaves the mountain asunder.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt

“Reincarnation is a story we tell; then in the end it's the story itself that is the reincarnation.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt

“...teaching was the most rigorous form of learning.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt

“If you don’t act on it, it wasn’t a true feeling”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Martians

“It is easy to live multiple lives! What is hard is to be a whole person”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Fifty Degrees Below

“In an expanding universe, Spencer had said, order was not really order, but merely the difference between the actual entropy exhibited and the maximum entropy possible.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Blue Mars

“Language is but a huge set of false analogies. There has to be a better way to make a point.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Antarctica

“Oh God," Coyote said, and rolled onto his side, propping his head up on one hand. "It's hard to remember something that long ago. It's almost like an epic poem I memorized once, and can barely recite anymore.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“
Maya felt the turbulent maelstrom of emotions inside her, stirred by all she had seen on her circumnavigation, by all that had happened and all that was going to happen... ah, the floods within her, the flash floods in her mind! If only she could accomplish the same yoking of her spirit that they had with this aquifer - drain it, control it, make it sane. But the hydrostatic pressures were so intense, the outbreaks when they came so fierce. No pipeline could hold it.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“And some part of him saw it was going to be all right. the heart is pleased by one thing after another. ”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Blue Mars

“We all have seven secret lives. The life of excretion; the world of inappropriate sexual fantasies; our real hopes; our terror of death; our experience of shame; the world of pain; and our dreams. No one else ever knows these lives. Consciousness is solitary. Each person lives in that bubble universe that rests under the skull, alone.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo's Dream

“They were so ignorant! Young men and women, educated very carefully to be apolitical, to be technicians who thought they disliked politics, making them putty in the hands of their rulers, just like always. It was appalling how stupid they were, really, and he could not help lashing into them.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

“The only part of an argument that really matters is what we think of the people arguing. X claims a, Y claims b. They make arguments to support their claims with any number of points. But when their listeners remember the discussion, what matters is simply that X believes a and Y believes b. People then form their judgment on what they think of X and Y.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

“...no one knows why things happen, you see? Anything could follow from anything. Even real history tells us nothing.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt

“Desire is life trying to continue to be life. All living things desire... Life is wanting.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt

“We dream, we wake on a cold hillside, we pursue the dream again. In the beginning was the dream, and the work of disenchantment never ends.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Icehenge

“We have to start doing this in ignorance of the details of how to do it. We have to learn how to do it in the attempt itself. It is something we are going to have to imagine.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Sixty Days and Counting

“Logic was to cognition as geometry was to landscape”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Sixty Days and Counting

“An excess of reason is itself a form of madness”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Forty Signs of Rain

“You just don't have faith!" Frank repeated.
"Well I hope I never get it! It's like being hit by a hammer in the head!”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

“In a capitalist world, the word capital has taken on more and more uses. . . . human capital, for instance, which is what labor accumulates through education and work experience. Human capital differs from the classic kind in that you can't inherit it, and it can only be rented, not bought or sold.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“The vaunted experience of age was perhaps only a matter of wounds and scarring -- that young minds to old minds might be as young bodies to old bodies: stronger, more vital, less twisted by damage.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“It was not power that corrupted people, but fools who corrupted power.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“It would take 2,000 Vietnam Memorials to list the [Twentieth] century’s war dead.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Remaking History and Other Stories