Robin Sloan famous quotes

Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines -- it's hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.
-- Robin Sloan

#Sleep #Library #Spirit

Neel takes a sharp breath and I know exactly what it means. It means: I have waited my whole life to walk through a secret passage built into a bookshelf.
-- Robin Sloan

#Mean #Secret #Whole Life

I've never listened to an audiobook before, and I have to say it's a totally different experience. When you read a book, the story definitely takes place in your head. When you listen, it seems to happen in a little cloud all around it, like a fuzzy knit cap pulled down over your eyes
-- Robin Sloan

#Book #Eye #Clouds

He has the strangest expression on his face- the emotional equivalent of 404 PAGE NOT FOUND.
-- Robin Sloan

#Emotional #Expression #Pages

Your life must be an open city, with all sorts of ways to wander in.
-- Robin Sloan

#Life #Cities #Way

I'd sit at my kitchen table and start scanning help-wanted ads on my laptop, but then a browser tab would blink and I'd get distracted and follow a link to a long magazine article about genetically modified wine grapes. Too long, actually, so I'd add it to my reading list. Then I'd follow another link to a book review. I'd add the review to my reading list, too, then download the first chapter of the book—third in a series about vampire police. Then, help-wanted ads forgotten, I'd retreat to the living room, put my laptop on my belly, and read all day. I had a lot of free time.
-- Robin Sloan

#Book #Reading #Wine

There is no immortality that is not built on friendship and work done with care. All the secrets in the world worth knowing are hiding in plain sight. It takes forty-one seconds to climb a ladder three stories tall. It's not easy to imagine the year 3012, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. We have new capabilities now—strange powers we're still getting used to. The mountains are a message from Aldrag the Wyrm-Father. Your life must be an open city, with all sorts of ways to wander in.
-- Robin Sloan

#Father #Mean #Sight

This girl has the spark of life. This is my primary filter for new friends (girl- and otherwise) and the highest compliment I can pay. I've tried many times to figure out exactly what ignites it -- what cocktail of characteristics come together in the cold, dark cosmos to form a star. I know it's mostly in the face -- not just the eyes, but the brow, the cheeks, the mouth, and the micromuscles that connect them all. Kat's micromuscles are very attractive.
-- Robin Sloan

#Girl #Stars #Eye

Imagination runs out. But it makes sense, right? We probably just imagine things based on what we already know, and we run out of analogies in the thirty-first century.
-- Robin Sloan

#Running #Imagination #Analogies

So I switch to my MacBook and make my rounds: news sites, blogs, tweets. I scroll back to find the conversations that happened without me during the day. When every single piece of media you consume is time-shifted, does that mean it’s actually you that’s time-shifted?
-- Robin Sloan

#Mean #Media #Pieces

Why does the typical adventuring group consist of a wizard, a warrior, and a rogue, anyway? It should really be a wizard, a warrior, and a rich guy. Otherwise who's going to pay for all the swords and spells and hotel rooms?
-- Robin Sloan

#Warrior #Guy #Doe

... nothing lasts long. We all come to life and gather allies and build empires and die, all in a single moment - maybe a single pulse of some giant processor somewhere.
-- Robin Sloan

#Long #Giants #Empires

So I guess you could say Neel owes me a few favors, except that so many favors have passed between us now that they are no longer distinguishable as individual acts, just a bright haze of loyalty. OUr friendship is a nebula. (34)
-- Robin Sloan

#Loyalty #Favors #Nebula

A clerk and a ladder and warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time.
-- Robin Sloan

#Book #Light #Clerks

...I can’t stop squirming. If fidgets were Wikipedia edits, I would have completely revamped the entry on guilt by now, and translated it into five new languages.
-- Robin Sloan

#Guilt #Wikipedia #Language

When every single piece of media you consume is time-shifted, does that mean it's actually you that's time-shifted?
-- Robin Sloan

#Mean #Media #Pieces

Kat bought a New York Times but couldn’t figure out how to operate it, so now she’s fiddling with her phone.
-- Robin Sloan

#New York #Phones #Figures

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.
-- Robin Sloan

#Evil #Long #Would Be

I walk alone in the darkness and wonder how a person would begin to determine the circumference of the earth. I have no idea. I’d probably just google it.
-- Robin Sloan

#Ideas #Darkness #Google

If this sounds impressive to you, you’re over thirty.
-- Robin Sloan

#Sound #Thirty #Impressive

After that, the book will fade, the way all books fade in your mind. But I hope you will remember this: A man walking fast down a dark lonely street. Quick steps and hard breathing, all wonder and need. A bell above a door and the tinkle it makes. A clerk and a ladder and warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time.
-- Robin Sloan

#Lonely #Book #Dark

There is no immortality that is not built on friendship and work done with care. All the secrets in the world worth knowing are hiding in plain sight.
-- Robin Sloan

#Knowing #Sight #Secret

You know, I'm really starting to think the whole world is just a patchwork quilt of crazy little cults, all with their own secret spaces, their own records, their own rules.
-- Robin Sloan

#Quilts #Crazy #Thinking

Her home is the burrow of a bibliophile hobbit -- low-ceilinged, close-walled, and brimming over with books.
-- Robin Sloan

#Book #Home #Lows

Some of them are working very hard indeed. “What are they doing?” “My boy!” he said, eyebrows raised. As if nothing could be more obvious. “They are reading!
-- Robin Sloan

#Reading #Boys #Eyebrows

Then: I google "time-series visualization" and start work on a new version of my model, thinking that maybe I can impress her with a prototype. I am really into the kind of girl you can impress with a prototype.
-- Robin Sloan

#Girl #Thinking #Google

He asked <...> Rosemary, why do you love books so much? And I said, Well, I don't know <...> I suppose I love them because they're quiet, and I can take them to the park.
-- Robin Sloan

#Book #Rosemary #Parks

Let me give you some advice: make friends with a millionaire when he's a friendless sixth-grader.
-- Robin Sloan

#Giving #Advice #Millionaire

America pays defense contractors to build aircraft carriers. Google pays brilliant programmers to do whatever the hell they want.
-- Robin Sloan

#America #Google #Aircraft Carriers

Our books still do not require batteries. But I am no fool. It is a slender advantage.
-- Robin Sloan

#Book #Fool #Batteries

I feel a little whirl of dislocation -- the trademark sensation of the world being more closely knit together than you expected
-- Robin Sloan

#Together #Littles #World

All the secrets of the world worth knowing are hiding in plain site.
-- Robin Sloan

#Knowing #Secret #World

(about Kindles) I have one and I use it most nights. I always imagine the books staring and whispering, Traitor!
-- Robin Sloan

#Book #Night #Whispering

I sit up straight and do the first thing a person is supposed to do in an emergency, which is send a text message.
-- Robin Sloan

#Messages #Firsts #Emergencies

Are there sexual fetishes that involve books? There must be. I try not to imagine how they might work.
-- Robin Sloan

#Book #Trying #Might

The thinnest tendrils of dawn are creeping in from the east. People in New York are softly starting to tweet.
-- Robin Sloan

#New York #People #East