Kim Stanley Robinson Quotes

It is a long time ago. So many lives ago--I get them all confused, don’t you?

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....

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 was so delicious— the way they could have, potentially, all the best parts of all...time, combined magically into some superb, as-yet-unseen synthesis— or throw all that aside, and finally strike a new path to the heart of just government. . . .To go from that to the mundane problematic...was an inevitable letdown, and instinctively people put it off.

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.

Desire is life trying to continue to be life. All living things desire, bacteria feel desire. Life is wanting.

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—

You can only kill disappointment with a new try.

They lived like monkeys still, while their new god powers lay around them in the weeds.

Nothing was ever normal again.Many lives change like that -- all of a sudden, and forever.

Humans were still not only the cheapest robots around, but also, for many tasks, the only robots that could do the job. They were self-reproducing robots too. They showed up and worked generation after generation; give them 3000 calories a day and a few amenities, a little time off, and a strong jolt of fear, and you could work them at almost anything. Give them some ameliorative drugs and you had a working class, reified and coglike.

They tell each other what they are thinking. But there is no reason to believe anything they say.

Because life is robust,Because life is bigger than equations, stronger than money, stronger than guns and poison and bad zoning policy, stronger than capitalism,Because Mother Nature bats last, and Mother Ocean is strong, and we live inside our mothers forever, and Life is tenacious and you can never kill it, you can never buy it,So Life is going to dive down into your dark pools, Life is going to explode the enclosures and bring back the commons,O you dark pools of money and law and quantitudinal stupidity, you oversimple algorithms of greed, you desperate simpletons hoping for a story you can understand,Hoping for safety, hoping for cessation of uncertainty, hoping for ownership of volatility, O you poor fearful jerks,Life! Life! Life! Life is going to kick your ass.