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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 270c6e3 | No, we're the two old Muppets on the balcony, cracking lame jokes. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| c29e69e | the passenger compartment of this one goes right to the moon. The booster stage will come back down after your launch and land right over there." She pointed across the concrete" -- | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 9d62066 | Strange how one remembered faces until you tried to look at them in your mind, when they turned away from you. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 35590e1 | Best to strip all statements of real content, this was a basic law of diplomacy. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 01e4ac6 | The way got harder. One day they made only a kilometer. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| b0a7fda | This noisy black creature would be the start of it all: a horse startled, his eye round, scraped white around it, a white tear streak under the eye, also scraped. Mouth open as it whinnied in protest at being seen, then reared and wheeled away, as it had done on the ridge, in that moment when some part of Loon had been born, his wander's great moment, when he had realized the world was stuffed with a meaning he couldn't express. Right here .. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 885b54a | Well-established law, going back to Roman law, to the Justinian Code in fact, turned out to be weirdly clear on the status of the intertidal. It's crazy to read, like Roman futurology: The things which are naturally everybody's are: air, flowing water, the sea, and the sea-shore. So nobody can be stopped from going on to the sea-shore. The sea-shore extends as far as the highest winter tide. The law of all peoples gives the public a right t.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| ff4b8a6 | Someone should enjoy it," Ann said. When she was angry or bitter her voice became flat and distant, almost as if she were being matter-of-fact. "It won't be here long." | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 4e79273 | I see the hills look odd too. Not tectonic action, nor rain, nor riverbeds, nor glaciers, nor wind shaped these hills. They are uncanny. You can see something is different here, and it's hard not to feel it's wrong. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| accdd81 | They [women] looked at you-they looked at everything-with a most piercing glance. They were the most curious animals of all, even more than their sisters fox and cat. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 8830e38 | With practice one could dodge the past almost entirely. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 4479e6d | The Amex man had even lifted his wrist to his mouth to take down a note, in a gesture obviously meant to be seen: | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| dbdca33 | When I'm with you I feel faintly anxious, judged, inadequate. Not the kind of person you like, which I find offensive, and thus behave more like that part of me than ever. Though I want your good opinion too, but that desire I find irritating, and so contradicted in myself. Why should I care? You don't care. And yet you do care. "I love you," you said. And she wanted him to feel that way when he was with her." | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 49d9373 | Then comes September and the sun tilts to the south. Yes, autumn in New York: the great song of the city and the great season. Not just for the relief from the brutal extremes of winter or summer, but for that glorious slant of the light, that feeling that in certain moments lances in on that tilt--that you had been thinking you were living in a room and suddenly with a view between buildings out to the rivers, a dappled sky overhead, you a.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 16a7454 | It was hard for her not to feel that a person loving her was making a big mistake, because she knew herself better than they did, so knew their love was given in error, and thus they must be some kind of fool. And yet it was precisely that misplaced love she wanted; someone who would like you more than you do; someone who likes you despite yourself; someone more generous to you than you are. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| bb89db9 | Red Mars! It was transfixing, mesmerizing. Everyone felt it. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| fb37938 | One sequence of these diary notes had lasted longer than most, and by their content he saw that they came from the time right after his father had died. One line stuck him like a thorn: Alone in the house. Must get used to it. He stared at her crabbed handwriting. He saw how it must have been, and sat down in the nearest chair. A spasm of sorrow passed through him, followed after a while by a wash of relief, as he realized that his mom was .. | diary family grief | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| 27fe7fa | Squatters. The dispossessed. The water rats. Denizens of the deep, citizens of the shallows. And a lot of them were interested in trying something different, including which authorities they gave their consent to be governed by. Hegemony had drowned, so in the years after the flooding there was a proliferation of cooperatives, neighborhood associations, communes, squats, barter, alternative currencies, gift economies, solar usufruct, fishin.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| e8fb7c1 | We should do this more often," Charlotte lied. "For sure," Larry lied back." | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| bf93867 | Late in this quiet meal Ann looked around curiously at her companions, suddenly awed by the spectacle of human adaptability. Here they were eating their dinner, talking over the low boom from the north, in a perfect illusion of dining-room conviviality; it might have been anywhere anytime, and their tired faces bright with some collective success, or merely with the pleasure of eating together--while just outside their chamber the broken wo.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| e9bcef5 | Reality is not a matter of our senses. It can't be visualized. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| cedfb33 | Depressed people did not usually engage in criminal conspiracies | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| e919275 | This perpetual rise and fall now got measured to an obsessive-compulsive degree, understandable given the traumas of the last century and the distinct possibility of future traumas. Sea level had for the most part stabilized after the Second Pulse, but there was still a lot of Antarctic ice teetering on the brink, so past performance was no guarantee of future anything. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 872c202 | Of course I will like forever any woman who has gone to bed with me, as long as we don't become a couple and hate each other forever. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 458cf28 | It's stupid because it makes the assumption that your enemies are weaker than you, and will do what you want if you murder a few of them. But people aren't like that. I mean, think about how it will fall out. You go down that canyon and kill a bunch of people doing their jobs, and later other people come along and find the bodies. They'll hate you forever. Even if you do take over Mars someday they'll still hate you, and do anything they ca.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 4b19981 | Analogies always deceive more than they reveal; I am no fan of analogies, I do not use them. Even metaphor, that mental operation we use with almost every word we speak, is slippery and deceptive. I always speak as plainly as I can. And yet language, and therefore thought, is a strange and imprecise game of metaphors and analogies, one that we must play to stay alive. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 1af6e0d | What was personal gain but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And what was power but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And once you had that freedom, any more wealth or power actually began to restrict one's options, and reduce one's freedom. One became a servant of one's wealth or power, constrained to spend all one's time protecting it. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 8684f91 | Hierarchy, you know. And their place in the hierarchy. As long as it's high enough. Everyone bound into their places. It's safer than freedom. And a lot of people are cowards. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 64c0127 | the way bubbles work is structurally identical to Ponzi schemes--what a coincidence!--and indeed it's another amazing coincidence how much the entire capitalist economy resembles in its basic structure either a Ponzi scheme or a bundle of Ponzi schemes. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| bbfebbe | this gave her the confidence to start speaking more explicitly about the left wing of the Democratic Party, a burgeoning national movement, and how they intended to usurp the business chickenshits among them once and for all, and see if government could go back to being the people's company. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 90d3895 | Not to have a correct political view is like having no soul. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| d2c4af6 | It's just I finally get what revolution means. It's maximum volatility with no hedging. And it's insider trading too! Because, since I know in advance you're going to default your people, I can buy put options up the wazoo before the IPPI goes down! It's totally illegal! I finally get why revolution is illegal. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| dba0ec8 | And what a story. The first thing that drew me in was disbelief. What? Humanity sins but it's God's Son who pays the price? I tried to imagine Father saying to me, 'Piscine, a lion slipped into the llama pen today and killed two llamas. Yesterday another one killed a black buck. Last week two of them ate a camel. The situation has become intolerable. Something must be done. I have decided that the only way the lions can atone for their sins.. | Yann Martel | ||
| 00647de | It was that ocean heat that caused the First Pulse to pulse, and later brought on the second one. People sometimes say no one saw it coming, but no, wrong: they did. Paleoclimatologists looked at the modern situation and saw CO2 levels screaming up from 280 to 450 parts per million in less than three hundred years, faster than had ever happened in the Earth's entire previous five billion years (can we say "Anthropocene," class?), and they s.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| fb854f3 | Existential nausea comes from feeling trapped. It is an affect state resulting from the feeling that the future has only bad options. Of course every human faces the fact of individual death, and therefore existential nausea must be to a certain extent a universal experience, and something that must be dealt with by one mental strategy or another. Most people appear to learn to ignore it, as if it were some low chronic pain that has to be e.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| f4978e3 | At this point justice and revenge are the same thing! Justice for people would be revenge on the oligarchs. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 1e338df | Buddhism begins in personal experience. Observation of one's surroundings and one's reactions, and one's thoughts. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 07ef42b | If democracy came to China they would end up electing idiots, as in America. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| fd71603 | Some people get lucky and partner up with someone the same age, they know the same songs, have the same references and all that, good for them! But for the rest of us it's catch-as-catch-can. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 62185c3 | The Americans lost all the battles but won the war. Because when they lost they were still here. It was their home. They would go off and regroup, and the British would follow them and beat on them again somewhere else. There were a couple American victories along the way, but mostly not. Mostly the British won, but even so they eventually wore down, and in the end the Americans surrounded them and kicked them out. The Brits were going to r.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| bf409d9 | Anticipation worse than the act itself, as with so many things. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| f593618 | But that was back in the twentieth century, in the dark ages, the age of fascisms both home and abroad. Since the floods they had learned better, hadn't they? | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| db00936 | If it was 200 Kelvin outside why not say so, rather than talk about witches' tits and the like, | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| d900997 | How many cameras do you have deployed now?" "It's a few million. The limiting factor these days is the analysis. I'll" -- | Kim Stanley Robinson |