211 Quotes by Robin Sloan

Lost in the shadows of the shelves, I almost fall off the ladder. I am exactly halfway up. The floor of the bookstore is far below me, the surface of a planet I’ve left behind.

Greatest among us are those who can deploy “my friend” to total strangers in a way that is not hollow, but somehow real and deeply felt; those who can make you, within seconds of first contact, believe it.

Typographers are designers; designers are my people.

Its a museum’s job to keep things for posterity,“Tabitha sniffs. “We have a temperature-controlled storage unit full of Christmas sweaters.

The house was large and deeply lived-in, all the shelves and surfaces stacked with books and boxes, framed pictures, old greeting cards set up like tent cities... Every single surface told a story. A long one. With digressions.

I can’t eat pizza. If we actually end up with a pizza, it’s going to be your responsibility to consume it. Do not let me have any. Even if I ask for some.” He pauses. “I’ll probably ask for some.

But I kept at it with the help-wanted ads. My standards were sliding swiftly. At first I had insisted I would only work at a company with a mission I believed in. Then I thought maybe it would be fine as long as I was learning something new. After that I decided it just couldn’t be evil. Now I was carefully delineating my personal definition of evil.

There had to be a scale somewhere – the scale of stars, the scale of far-off cosmic super-beings – upon which we ourselves, we humans with our cities and bridges and subterranean markets, would look like the lactobacilli and the yeast.

He was a religious kid, and the goldsmith’s trade turned him off. He spent all day melting old baubles down to make new ones – and he knew his own work was going to suffer the same fate. Everything he believed told him: This is not important. There is no gold in the city of God.