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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 92fd463 | People only invoke history to ballast their arguments in the present." "Maybe" | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| ee022ee | She cocked her head, looked curiously at him. Suddenly he was afraid; they were their pasts, they had to be or they were nothing at all, and whatever they felt or thought or said in the present was nothing more than an echo of the past; and so when they said what they said, how could they know what their deeper minds were really feeling, thinking, saying? They didn't know, not really. Relationships were for that reason utterly mysterious, t.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| aab241f | We are making a better way to live. This was the myth, they had all grown up with it. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 07b005a | Always they argued. Neither conceded anything, no compromises were made, nothing was ever accomplished. They argued using the same words to mean different things, and scarcely even spoke to one another. Once it had been different, very long ago, when they had argued in the same language, and understood each other. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 104a368 | A] healthy respect for tradition[;]...a kind of default survival behavior | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| ea21c89 | Blondes make the best victims. They're like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints. | Alfred Hitchcock | ||
| 961d55e | This award is] meaningful because it comes from my fellow dealers in celluloid. | Alfred Hitchcock | ||
| c710ec2 | They could do anything. That, however, was part of what made it difficult to bring [it] to a close. Infinite possibility was going to collapse, in the act of choosing, to the single world line of history. The future becoming the past: there was something disappointing in this passage through the loom, this so-sudden diminution from infinity to one, the collapse from potentiality to reality which was the action of time itself. The potential .. | potential | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| 8f7f02b | He was not interested in what they were doing, not any of it-- it was both ugly and abstract, a continuous manipulation of people devoid of any of the tangible rewards that so much work had. That's politics.... | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 9bf55a4 | Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, alive | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 6ba5758 | What does it mean to love the past? Each day disappears into nothingness, and we must live every moment of our lives in the present. The present is the whole of reality. But human beings are more than real. We plunge through the years like giants, as the poet said, and not one of us can be understood except as creatures continuously exfoliating. When memory fails to contain us we must love the past more than ever, to hold it to us--or else .. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 667bb1e | Arabic, like Greek, had been a scientific language early on, | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| ffba94e | So nearly everyone had an opinion. Polls showed that most supported the Russell program, an informal name for Sax's plans to terraform the planet by all means possible, as fast as they could. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| bd2e6d5 | Ramona was willing to talk about anything, now, about things beyond the present moment. Childhoods in El Modena and at the beach. The boats offshore. Their work. The people they knew. The huge rocks jumbled under them: "Where they come from, anyway?" They didn't know. It didn't matter. What do you talk about when you're falling love? It doesn't matter. All the questions are, Who are you? How do you think? Are you like me? Will you love me.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| cca2b40 | Nothing was ever normal again. Many lives change like that -- all of a sudden, and forever. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 280d256 | Spoofing? No. Ponzi scheme? Not at all! Just finance. Legal as hell. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| d20508d | The one percent get nasty when their assets are threatened. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| ffa5f40 | We demand justice," Jeff says. "we don't have it, the world is a mess because of assholes who think they can steal everything and get away with it. So we have to overwhelm them and get back to justice." "And conditions are ripe, is that what you're saying?" "Very ripe. People are pissed off. They're scared for their kids. That's the moment things can tip. If it works like Chenoweth's law says it does, then you only need about fifteen percen.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 44bedac | a postcarbon landscape, each | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| ff82c6e | It's too bad we only had the courage to live our lives fully in dreams. | ss | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| 0fa3678 | Money equals power; power makes the law; and law makes government. So that the national governments in trying to restrain the transnats were like the Lilliputians trying to tie down Gulliver. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| bfc91e4 | Any physical action, properly studied and practiced, could no doubt be accomplished with a reasonable amount of skill, if not flair. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 193295e | A square object was visible at a greater distance than a round object of the same area. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 84e9a8d | Then it's a matter of troubleshooting, grasping the bull by the horns, seizing the nettle, coping and hoping, damning torpedoes and trying any old thing. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 321a1d5 | It's not so bad to be a prisoner, if you're working on an escape. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 4fcba1d | if one's physical presence made any difference these days! It was an absurd anachronism, but that's the way people were. Another vestige of the savannah. They lived like monkeys still, while their new god powers lay around them in the weeds. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| a80e4c2 | All that day he spent distracted, wandering as if still in a dream, wondering from time to time how one told the difference. Wasn't this life dreamlike in every significant respect? Everything overlit, bizarre, symbolic of something else? | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 30c1a02 | Thus when Hiroko came up and said, "Nadia, this crescent wrench is absolutely frozen in this position," Nadia sang to her, "That's the only thing I'm thinking of-- baby!" and took the crescent wrench and slammed it against a table like a hammer, and twiddled the dial to show Hiroko it was unstuck, and laughed at her expression. "The engineer's solution," she explained, and went humming into the lock, thinking how funny Hiroko was, a woman w.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 58ac3f5 | Nadia shook her head, marveling at the capacity people had for ignoring what they had in common, and fighting bitterly over whatever small differences existed between them. She | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| f6d938d | causing a refugee crisis rated at ten thousand katrinas. One | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 73ec8ae | Where there is faction, there is conflict; where there is conflict, there is anger. And anger distorts judgment. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 43d0877 | the crowds just background tapestries for you to play your life against, lurid backdrops providing a fake sense of drama to help you imagine you're doing more than you would be if you were in some sleepy village or Denver or really anywhere else. New | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 074861c | Life itself is a moment like this, the soul beat down and held to knowledge: you keep on trudging upward, the goal shifts in and out of sight, always further away than you expected, and the work is hard and unremitting. And the questions are the same as always: What are you doing? Is it the right thing? Should you go back? -- Nothing up here but the same answers, stripped bare of all complication: Just walk. Keep hiking. That's all you can .. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 56ba2dd | not in any single system, but in the stack of all systems, the accidental megasystem. It | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 75bf4e7 | Every age had its losses, they said, even youth, which lost first childhood, then youth too. And all first things were vivid, including losses. "Just keep learning," the old woman said." | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| e5f95bd | But at this point the four hundred richest people on the planet owned half the planet's wealth, and the top one percent owned fully eighty percent of the world's wealth. For them it wasn't so bad. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| b1ab02f | Anyway that's a large part of what economics is--people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven't just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 602f12a | Individuals make history, but it's also a collective thing, a wave that people ride in their time, a wave made of individual actions. So ultimately history is another particle/wave duality that no one can parse or understand. | collective-action history individual-action | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| 4107a00 | The beautiful statue of Ganymede and the eagle looked like they had been molded out of white ceramic, and in Ganymede's outstretched arms it seemed to me a whole world was being embraced, a rushing world of gray sky and gray water where everything passed by so fast that you cnever got the chance to hold it, to touch it, to make it yours. Can't we keep anything? | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| c49eb53 | We pretend that democracy is real, and | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 8251a34 | Saint George, a social terrarium in which the men think they are living in a Mormon polygamy, while the women consider it a lesbian world with a small percentage of male lesbians | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 702ec80 | nonviolent civil resistance of various soft kinds is demonstrably more successful than violent resistance when it comes to actually achieving the stated goals of the resistance and changing things for the better. Chenoweth | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 25c8ea9 | If you're in Congress, don't you have to be there sometimes? | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 8b45776 | But that was back in the twentieth century, in the dark ages, | Kim Stanley Robinson |