Robert Charles Wilson

“Are you just a car salesman or are you a poet too?” “I've never been accused of poetry before.”

“Certainly it's a rare glimpse into the lives of the Secular Ancients. They don't seem as bad as the Dominion histories make them out to be. Though clearly they were imperfect.""I don't deny that they were imperfect," Julian said in a distant voice. "I'm not uncritical of the Secular Ancients, Adam. They had all sorts of vices, and they committed one sin for which I can never bring myself to entirely forgive them.""What sin is that?""They evolved into us," he said.”

“I won't put my ignorance on an altar and call it God. It feels like idolatry, like the worst kind of idolatry.”

“By definition, you can’t experience your own death. Death is the end of consciousness. And consciousness persists. In the language of physics, consciousness is conserved.I am the one who wakes up in the morning.Always.Every morning.I don’t die.I just become increasingly unlikely.”

“Ars moriendi ars vivendi est: the art of dying is the art of living.”

“Sandra had studied psychiatry in order to understand the nature of despair, but all she had really learned was the pharmacology of it. The human mind was easier to medicate than to comprehend.”

“Part of waging war is knowing when you’re outgunned.”

“The universe, it seemed, was full to brimming with lonesome places.”

“The view was in an unearthly way beautiful, but it was also unendurable. It implied too much”

“Violence is the great attractor of human history, Dr. Iverson. A force almost as irresistible as gravity.”