269 Quotes by Kim Stanley Robinson

So it’s still New York. People can’t give up on it. It’s what economists used to call the tyranny of sunk costs: once you’ve put so much time and money into a project, it gets hard to just eat your losses and walk. You are forced by the structure of the situation to throw good money after bad, grow obsessed, double down, escalate your commitment, and become a mad gibbering apartment dweller, unable to imagine leaving. You persevere unto death, a monomaniacal New Yorker to the end.

It is easy to live multiple lives! What is hard is to be a whole person.

Enough is as good as a feast. And it’s when everyone is equal that your kids are safest.

Every moment an epiphany arrives, and cleaves the mountain asunder.

That’s libertarians for you – anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.

It was a whiny culture, we were finding.

I know.” She sighed. “We’ll all say that. We’ll all go on and make the place safe. Roads, cities. New sky, new soil. Until it’s all some kind of Siberia or Northwest Territories, and Mars will be gone and we’ll be here, and we’ll wonder why we feel so empty. Why when we look at the land we can never see anything but our own faces.

One sign of a good action is that in retrospect it appears inevitable.

What can I say, friends?” he cried. “This is the thing itself, there are no words for this. This is what words ask for.