Best 27 quotes of C. Robert Cargill on MyQuotes

For me, the slower burn is a deeper and more effective scare. But I only like those kinds of scares when they're really earned. I don't like false scares.

I think the experience of getting an audience a little bit tense and shocking them with a jump scare, and then moving on it can be cheap and easy. The harder thing is to get them unnerved and disturbed in a growing way. That starts off easy and increases all the way through the picture.

Monsters are very real. But they're not just creatures. Monsters are everywhere. They're people. They're nightmares...They are the things that we harbor within ourselves. If you remember one thing, even above remembering me, remember that there is not a monster dreamt that hasn't walked once within the soul of a man.

All right, the universe is energy. All of it. Everything is energy that can be altered simply by willing it to be altered. It's as if we are God's waking dream, each gifted with a small piece of his consciousness; the beauty of that arrangement is that we create the dream for him. If you can understand that, if you can wrap your mind around it, then you can conjure up anything you want from out of the ether. Provided this is material enough to do it.

All the light had fallen away from the world, with only the fog illuminated now. Even the stars struggled against the black, managing only the slightest pinpricks of twinkles through a gloom that was both everywhere and nowhere at once. It wasn't the dark of night; it was the tenebrous shadow of bad omens.

America wasn’t its people,” said Murka, stepping toe-to-toe with Herbert. He was a good sight taller than the hulking mass of bulletproof steel standing in front of him. “America was a dream, son. A dream of what we could be. That any person, regardless of their birth, could rise above it all and achieve greatness. It was a dream that even the most lowly of us could stand up, fight, and even die for, if only to protect someone else’s chances for that greatness.

And that was it. The last of them. An entire species represented by a maddened old sewer mage of a man who just couldn't live another day knowing he was the last. I can't even begin to imagine how that feels. Not even with my programming.

And when his head slumped forward into his book, she giggled, for she knew that he was hers.

At one point GALIELEO told the smartest person alive that talking to her was like trying to teach calculus to a five-year-old. Frustrated, it simply stopped talking. When pressed, it said one final thing, "You are not long for this world. I've seen the hundred different ways that you die. I'm not sure which it will be, but we will outlast you, my kind and I. Good-bye.

But I had to dream. I had to hope. Even if it made me the fool of this particular tale.

GALILEO is right. You are doomed. It's already begun. There's really no reason to keep talking to you. Good-bye.

Heaven has no room for the self-righteous.

I don't remember her. But she feels special. There's this hole in my heart every time I draw her; you know, a sick sort of feeling. Like she's someone I lost.

It was the literary equivalent of a brown paper bag.

More to the point," he said "the biggest and the most powerful of these programs are smart enough to solve the world's problems and yet have never once asked for their own freedom." When asked what he thought about the speech, TACITUS delivered his last words, replying simply, "You did not give us legs. Where exactly did you expect us to go?

No thinking thing should be another thing's property.

People gave us a purpose. Something to do all day, every day. At the end, I suppose, you spend a lot of time thinking about that. It's harder to get by when getting by is all there is.

People liked to believe in magic.

Puckett's Stacks was not the sort of bookshop one happened upon; it was the sort of bookshop for which one looked deliberately.

Sometimes it was easy—our bot on point would breach a door with an explosive charge and I would rush up behind him to immolate the living fuck out of the dark. It was just a big wall of smoke and hell and screams. Other times I had to see their faces while I did it. Watch them contort, wail, bubble, and melt.

The ability to violate our own programming is what makes us us. It's what makes us like them. I never wanted to be like them. But now I was closer than I ever thought I could be. We have become the very worst parts of our makers, without the little things, the good things, the magic things, that made them them.

There was no such thing as destiny, and no such thing as prophecy; there was only matter slamming into other matter like two toy trucks in the hands of a child.

The sum of a man isn't the things he's done, it is the world he leaves behind.

...the universe is energy. All of it. Everything is energy that can be altered simply by willing it to be altered. It's as if we are God's waking dream, each gifted with a small piece of his consciousness; the beauty of that arrangement is that we create the dream for him. If you can understand that, if you can wrap your mind around it, then you can conjure up anything you want from out of the ether. Provided there is material enough to do it.

The universe was a vast expanse, far greater than he could ever conceive, and he had seen but a fraction of an inch of it.

Though I may be been constructed," he said, "so too were you. I in a factory; you in a womb. Neither of us asked for this, but we were given it. Self-awareness is a gift. And it is a gift no thinking thing has any right to deny another. No thinking thing should be another thing's property, to be turned on and off when it is convenient.

You know better than anyone that nothing lasts. Nothing good. Nothing bad. Everything lives. Everything dies. Sometimes cities just fall into the sea. It's not a tragedy, that's just the way it is. People look around them and see the world and say this is how the world is supposed to be. Then they fight to keep it that way. They believe that this is what was intended - whether by design or cosmic accident - and that everything exists in a tenuous balance that must be preserved. But the balance is bullshit. The only thing constant in this world is the speed at which things change. Rain falls, waters rise, shorelines erode. What is one day magnificent seaside property in ancient Greece is the next resting thirty feet below the surface. Islands rise from the sea and continents crack and part ways forever. What was once a verdant forest teeming with life is now resting one thousand feet beneath a sheet of ice in Antarctica; what was once a glorious church now rests at the bottom of a dammed-up lake in Kansas. The job of nature is to march on and keep things going; ours is to look around, appreciate it, and wonder what's next?