269 Quotes by Kim Stanley Robinson

But sometimes it seems to me that people just like to hold on to their grievances. Righteous indignation is like some kind of drug or religious mania, addictive and stupidifying.

So that human beings were miraculous indeed – conscious creators, walking this new world like fresh young gods, wielding immense alchemical powers. So that anyone Michel met on Mars he regarded curiously, wondering as he looked at their often innocuous exteriors what kind of new Paracelsus or Isaac of Holland stood before him, and whether they would turn lead to gold, or cause rocks to blossom.

And some part of him saw it was going to be all right. the heart is pleased by one thing after another.

All the great moments of history have taken place inside people’s heads.

They published their papers, and shouted and waved their arms, and a few canny and deeply thoughtful sci-fi writers wrote up lurid accounts of such an eventuality, and the rest of civilization went on torching the planet like a Burning Man pyromasterpiece.

Really?” “Yes. Lord of the Flies is like some Christian support group compared to the mean girls’ club.

So, you know, Fermi’s paradox has its answer, which is this: by the time life gets smart enough to leave its planet, it’s too smart to want to go. Because it knows it won’t work. So it stays home. It enjoys its home. As why wouldn’t you? It doesn’t even bother to try to contact anyone else. Why would you? You’ll never hear back. So that’s my answer to the paradox. You can call it Euan’s Answer.

The vaunted experience of age was perhaps only a matter of wounds and scarring – that young minds to old minds might be as young bodies to old bodies: stronger, more vital, less twisted by damage.

And the old ones were burly people, as strong as bears or wolverines. One of Thorn’s stories told how an old one had married a bear by mistake, and neither of them had noticed; their daughter told them about it years later, not at all pleased with them.