2312 Quotes - QuotesSweet | quotesweet.com

Book: 2312
Quotes of Book: 2312

Kim Stanley Robinson _ 2312
she keeps a shrine to Sol Invictus in her room, performs the pratahsamdhya ceremony, the salute to the sun, every morning
book-quote
Kim Stanley Robinson _ 2312
It was hard for her not to feel that a person loving her was making a big mistake. Because she knew herself better than they did, so knew their love was given in error.
book-quote
Kim Stanley Robinson _ 2312
first a wind ensemble playing a transcription of the Appassionata piano sonata; then Beethoven's opus 134, which was his own transcription for two pianos of his Grosse Fugue for string quartet, opus 133. Lastly a string quartet was to play a transcription of their own for the Hammerklavier sonata.
book-quote
Kim Stanley Robinson _ 2312
It was hard for her not to feel that a person loving her was making a big mistake, because she knew herself better than they did, so knew their love was given in error, and thus they must be some kind of fool. And yet it was precisely that misplaced love she wanted; someone who would like you more than you do; someone who likes you despite yourself; someone more generous to you than you are.
book-quote
Kim Stanley Robinson _ 2312
When I'm with you I feel faintly anxious, judged, inadequate. Not the kind of person you like, which I find offensive, and thus behave more like that part of me than ever. Though I want your good opinion too, but that desire I find irritating, and so contradicted in myself. Why should I care? You don't care. And yet you do care. "I love you," you said. And she wanted him to feel that way when he was with her.
book-quote
Kim Stanley Robinson _ 2312
No happiness but in virtue. No, that wasn't true. Each part of the triune brain has its own happiness. Lizard in the sun, mammal on the hunt, human doing something good. What's good is good for the land. So when you worked as if on the hunt, in light and warmth, at making a landscape--some place for people to live in for ages to come--then you were triunely happy. Surely that should be enough. But then you wanted to share it. Just so there would be someone to be pleased together with.
book-quote
Kim Stanley Robinson _ 2312
Marriage," Swan repeated, marveling at the word. To her it was a concept from the Middle Ages, from old Earth--an idea with a strong whiff of patriarchy and property. Not meant for space, not meant for longevity. One moved through one's life in epochs, each a stage in one's history, lasting some few or several years, and then circumstances changed and you were in a new life, with new associates. That could not be altered, not if you were out there riding the great merry-go-round; and so to deform one's life in the attempt to make a relation last longer than its natural term was to risk wrecking its end, such that it splintered back along its whole length and left a bitter wound and a sense that it had all been a lie, where really there should only be a passing on, in one of the little death-and-transfigurations of one's epochs. That's just the way it was.
book-quote
Kim Stanley Robinson _ 2312
... and were making themselves into many things they have never been before: augmented, multi-sexed, and most importantly, very long lived, the oldest at that point being around two hundred years old. But not one whit wiser, or even more intelligent. Sad but true: individual intelligence probably peaked in the Upper Paleolithic, and we have been self-domesticated creatures ever since.
book-quote
Kim Stanley Robinson _ 2312
Sheer dumb sentience.
book-quote
Kim Stanley Robinson _ 2312
Mozart's pet starling once revised a phrase he wrote. The bird sang it after he played it on the piano, but changed all the sharps to flats. Mozart described it happening in the margin of the score. 'That was beautiful!' he wrote. When the bird died, he sang at its funeral, and read a poem to it.
book-quote
Kim Stanley Robinson _ 2312
People are foolish and bad, especially the French, and are always quickly seduced by power into insanity, and therefore lucky to have any kind of social order whatsoever, but the tougher the better.
book-quote
Kim Stanley Robinson _ 2312
When you look at the planet from low orbit, the impact of the Himalayas on Earth's climate seems obvious. It creates the rain shadow to beat all rain shadows, standing athwart the latitude of the trade winds and squeezing all the rain out of them before they head southwest, thus supplying eight of the Earth's mightiest rivers, but also parching not only the Gobi to the immediate north, but also everything to the southwest, including Pakistan and Iran, Mesopotamia, Saudi Arabia, even North Africa and southern Europe. The dry belt runs more than halfway across the Eurasia-African landmass - a burnt rock landscape, home to the fiery religions that then spread out and torched the rest of the world. Coincidence?
book-quote religion