269 Quotes by Kim Stanley Robinson

Memory is a haunting.

Historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can't grasp the current situation.

He felt himself dissolving down into the great mass of the mountain, tumbling slowly down through the rock. The mountain mumbled in his ear, "I am." With a puff of its cheeks it blew him aloft, threw his atoms out into the sky. They tumbled off on the wind and dispersed to every point of the compass . . .until his body and California were contiguous, united, one. Only his vision remained separate.

This is why tigers have ranges of hundreds of square kilometers," Vlad said. "Robber barons are not really very efficient.

He was not her therapist now but her lover, and if you couldn't make your lover angry, then what kind of lover was he? She saw the awful bind that one was put in when one's lover was also one's therapist-- how their objective eye and soothing voice could become the distancing device of a professional manner. A man doing his job--it was intolerable to be judged by such an eye, as if he were somehow above it all, and did not have any problems himself, any emotions that he could not control.

The triviality of the current scene usually put her off, but now she supposed that the politics of the moment always looked petty and stupid; only later did it take on the look of respectable statecraft, of immutable History.

It’s too bad we only had the courage to live our lives fully in dreams.

it would take 2,000 Vietnam Memorials to list the century's war dead. . . . he saw himself walking the Mall in Washington, D.C., and the whole park from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial was dotted with the black Vs of Vietnam Memorials, as if a flock of giant stealth birds had landed on it. All night he walked past black wing walls, moving west toward the white tomb on the river.

a streetlight reflected off the black cobblestones . . . in such a way that there were thousands of brief white squiggles underfoot, looking like names engraved on black granite, as if the whole surface of the earth were paved by a single memorial.