Antarctica Quotes

“The idea that each corporation can be a feudal monarchy and yet behave in its corporate action like a democratic citizen concerned for the world we live in is one of the great absurdities of our time—”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Antarctica

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

“It's lawmakers know better than anyone that laws are more a matter of practical compromise than any kind of moral imperative.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Antarctica

“McNeish had refused to haul the boats over the ice any farther, and Shackleton had taken him aside and given him a choice; go on hauling or Shackleton would shoot him dead. McNeish had gone on.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Antarctica

“Ta Shu had told him that right around the time Scott had died, his two-year-old son had rushed into his mother’s bedroom in England and said “Daddy’s not coming home.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Antarctica

“Although once after the Endurance had sunk, McNeish had refused to haul the boats over the ice any farther, and Shackleton had taken him aside and given him a choice; go on hauling or Shackleton would shoot him dead. McNeish had gone on.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Antarctica

“What can we make of Amundsen? His story is a knot. All his life he had been a man of the north, all his career had been an exploration of the north. He had found a Northwest Passage;”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Antarctica

“Shackleton was an officer junior to Scott, on a British Navy expedition.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Antarctica

“the eminent science writer who had not heard that his flight down had had to turn back just before the Point of Safe Return, so that after eight hours he had climbed out of the Herc back in Christchurch and looked around and said, “Why all the trees?”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Antarctica

“But Scott never learned that about dogs.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Antarctica

“Lord Kelvin at that time maintained that the Earth, because it was still radioactive, could not be more than a few million years old.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Antarctica

“true-cost true-benefit analysis, which is to say that all costs and benefits are included, including the so-called exterior costs, while the unpriceable aspects of the situation are also acknowledged and included.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Antarctica

“nor did he become obsessed with photography like so many other clients did, fussing with rolls and exposures until they did not seem to be seeing anything outside at all.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Antarctica

“Or, worse yet, when you meet a woman, and start something with her, the first woman you ever really loved; and then after a brief off-season you return to McMurdo an your reunion with her only to have her dump you on arrival as if your Kiwi idyll had never happened. Or when you see her around town soon after that, trolling with the best of them; or when you find out that some people are calling you 'the sandwich,' in reference to the ice women's old joke that bringing a boyfriend to Antarctica is like bringing a sandwich to a smorgasbord. Now that's heartbreak for you.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Antarctica

“Or, worse yet, when you meet a woman, and start something with her, the first woman you ever really loved; and then after a brief off-season you return to McMurdo an your reunion with her only to have her dump you on arrival as if your Kiwi idyll had never happened. Or when you see her around town soon after that, trolling with the best of tremor when you find out that some people are calling you "the sandwich," in reference to the ice women's old joke that bringing a boyfriend to Antarctica is like bringing a sandwich to a smorgasbord. No that's heartbreak for you.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Antarctica

“Indeed, if ever you are asked to choose between fixists and mobilists, as the two sides were called during the plate-tectonics controversy—or between the stabilists and the dynamicists in the current Sirius debate—always choose the dynamicists. History is on your side.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Antarctica

“...people come to this place to study it, and in doing so they invariably fall in love with it.

But why, you may well ask, seeing only the cold images I have been sending you. Why fall in love with it, so stripped and bare as it is. I wish I could explain it more clearly. But truly this place beggars the language. Still I must try one last time.

You see, the air is so clean. Mountains so distant, yet still focused and detailed; as if your eye had become telescopic. Water lying there glossy and compact, like shot silk in the sun. Never have you seen such clarity before, where the spiritual landscape stuffs the visible landscape until it bursts with luminous presence. Seeing things this clearly makes you wonder what the rest of the world would look like in such clean air. Not that more northerly air could ever be as clean as this, so cold and dry, so dustless—but on certain days, on certain mornings, all the World must once have had this clarity, and we the eyes to see it, and the desire to look. It must have been so beautiful...”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Antarctica

“The Götterdämmerung”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Antarctica

“North, south, east, west, and all the other attributes of feng shui—these are parts of the landscape of the imagination, which is a crucial part of all landscape, of course; crucial to our placement in the real world, on the Earth as we find it. But if the reality of Earth is perceived merely as material to be passed through, then it is not really there for you, and so the imagination becomes impoverished. The Earth is the imagination’s home and body. Unless you inhabit a place—not stay in one spot, but inhabit a place, as the paleolithic peoples inhabited their places, with every bush known and every rock named—then it becomes too decentered and metaphysical; you live in the imagination of an idea.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Antarctica

“The rational reasons were all rationales for an underlying irrationality.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Antarctica

“Each reality is followed by one stranger than the last.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Antarctica

“Only this moment, always. We never get to change the past. We never get to know the future. No reason to wish for one place rather than another; no reason to say I wish I were home, or I wish I were in an exotic new place that is not my home. They will all be the same as this place. Here the experience of existing comes clear. This world is our body. Now”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Antarctica

“the current coastline of Labrador, or Norway, or for that matter southern Chile. Elsewhere on the map, western Antarctica was an archipelago somewhat resembling the Philippines.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Antarctica