Kim Stanley Robinson

In fact Sax was suspicious of all the current cosmology, placing humanity as it did right at the center of things, time after time. It suggested to Sax that all these formulations were artifacts of human perception only, the strong anthropic principle seeping into everything they saw, like color.

People in the streets, that’s the only thing governments are afraid of. Well, or term limits. Or free elections! Or assassination. Or being laughed at, ah, ha-ha-ha!

Plague was plague, and could not be treated lightly. And this plague was obviously worse than most, having killed everyone in the region.

Why were the good days always so short? Moment to moment, day by day—each so full, and oh so lovely—and then gone forever, gone before there was a chance to absorb them properly, to really live them.

A sudden gust: How big the world seems in a wind.

Once upon a time she had suffered under the illusion that if she only exerted herself hard enough, the world would change. Now she knew better.

But he persevered. That was what a scientist did, confronted with an enigma.

There was nothing for it but to pace through just behind or ahead of the spooling present that was never there, caught in the nonexistent interval between the nonexistent past and the nonexistent future.

Rock is much more malleable than ideas.

In this case the problem was simply death. A quick decline indeed. And given the nature of life and of time, this was a problem that no living organism would ever truly solve. Postponements, yes; solutions, no. “Reality itself is mortal,” he said.

It’s a sorry excuse for a government anyway. It always gets back to the same old thing, power suckers sucking power.

And the mind-body connection was so strong—so strong that the distinction itself was probably false, a vestige of Cartesian metaphysics or earlier religious views of the soul. Mind was one body’s life. Memory was mind. And so, by a simple transitive equation, memory equaled life. So that with memory gone, life was gone.