Alastair Reynolds > Quotes

“A city's only ever three hot meals away from anarchy.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Terminal World

“I think I've reduced the amount of blood in my caffeine system to an acceptable level.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Revelation Space

“It’s the people who don’t worry—those who never have any doubts that what they’re doing is good and right—they’re the ones that cause the problems.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Redemption Ark

“To see something marvellous with your own eyes - that’s wonderful enough. But when two of you see it, two of you together, holding hands, holding each other close, knowing that you’ll both have that memory for the rest of your lives, but that each of you will only ever hold an incomplete half of it, and that it won’t ever really exist as a whole until you’re together, talking or thinking about that moment ... that’s worth more than one plus one. It’s worth four, or eight, or some number so large we can’t even imagine it.”
― Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns

“You worry that we're becoming monsters. Merlin, we already were monsters. You didn't make us any worse.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Thousandth Night / Minla's Flowers

“I've seen marvelous things, Sunday. I've looked back from the edge of the system and seen this planet, this Earth, reduced to a tiny dot of pale blue. I know what that feels like. To think that dot is where we came from, where we evolved out of the chaos and the dirt. And I know what it feels like to imagine going further. To hold that incredible, dangerous thought in my mind, if only for an instant. To think: what if I don't go home? What if I just keep traveling? Watching that pale-blue dot fall ever further away, until the darkness swallowed it and there was no turning back. Until Earth was just a blue memory.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Blue Remembered Earth

“There was something heartbreakingly beautiful about the lights of distant ships, I thought. It was something that touched both on human achievement and the vastness against which those achievements seemed so frail. It was the same thing whether the lights belonged to a caravel battling the swell on a stormy horizon or a diamond-hulled starship which had just sliced its way through interstellar space.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Chasm City

“if human beings really grasped how synthetic their world was - how much of it was stitched together not from direct perception, but from interpolation, memory, educated guesswork - they would go quietly mad.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Absolution Gap

“I don't know." That was typical Sajaki; like all the genuinely clever people Sylveste had met he knew better than to feign understanding where none existed.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Revelation Space

“Can we drop the ‘artificial intelligence’? It’s a bit like me calling you a meat-based processing system.”
― Alastair Reynolds, On the Steel Breeze

“It looked like a biology lesson for gods, or a snapshot of the kind of pornography which might be enjoyed by sentient planets.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Revelation Space

“Everything came and went, everything was new and bright with promise once and old and worn out later, and everything left a small, diminishing stain on eternity, a mark that time would eventually erase.”
― Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns

“The first six million years had been all fun and games.”
― Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns

“It's an ancient technique known as lying, Khouri.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Revelation Space

“How did you . . . pass the time?’ Sunday asked. ‘You couldn’t just ching out of it, could you?’

‘We had a different form of chinging,’ Eunice said. ‘An earlier type of virtual-reality technology, much more robust and completely unaffected by time lag. You may have heard of it. We called it “reading”.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Blue Remembered Earth

“Enjoy it, kid. Enjoy feeling that you can make a difference.' Floyd flashed him a smile. 'It won't last for ever.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Century Rain

“Meddling is what we do. It’s what defines us. Meddling gave us fire and tools and civilisation and the keys to the universe. Fingers will get burnt along the way, yes. That’s the way of it.”
― Alastair Reynolds, On the Steel Breeze

“Matter is lazy. It resists change. It wants to keep on doing whatever it's doing, whether that's sitting still or moving. We call that laziness inertia, but that doesn't mean we understand it. For a thousand years we've labelled it, quantified it, caged it in equations, but we've still only scratched the surface of what it really is.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Redemption Ark

“The human capacity for grief. It just isn't capable of providing an adequate emotional response once the dead exceed a few dozen in number. And it doesn't just level off—it just gives up, resets itself to zero. Admit it. None of us feel a damn about these people.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Revelation Space

“Consider all the inanimate matter in the universe, all the dumb atoms, all the mindless molecules, all the oblivious dust grains and pebbles and rocks and iceballs and worlds and stars, all the unthinking galaxies and superclusters, wheeling through the oblivious time-haunted megaparsecs of the cosmic supervoid.
In all that immensity, she had somehow contrived to BE a human being, a microscopically tiny, cosmically insignificant bundle of information-processing systems, wired to a mind more structurally complex than the Milky Way itself, maybe even more complex than the rest of the *whole damned universe*!”
― Alastair Reynolds, Blue Remembered Earth

“Life is precious. Infinitely so. Perhaps it takes a machine intelligence to appreciate that."
~"Understanding Space & Time”
― Alastair Reynolds, Zima Blue and Other Stories

“We all have it in us to be something other than what we are, I thought, but we don't often get a glimpse of what we could have been”
― Alastair Reynolds, Revenger

“Even monsters are beautiful.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Poseidon's Wake

“It's called optimism — but I’m losing the hang of it fast.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Revelation Space

“As the old saying went, the Manhattan Project wasn't built in a day. Or was that Rome? Something to do with Earth, anyway.”
― Alastair Reynolds

“Volyova felt as if her brain consisted of a room full of precocious schoolchildren: individually bright, and—if only they would pool themselves—capable of shattering insights. But some of those schoolchildren were not paying attention; they were staring dreamily out of the window, ignoring her protestations to focus on the present, because they found their own obsessions more intellectually attractive than the dull curriculum she was intent on dispensing.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Revelation Space

“So much for the tolerant acceptance of the other. We’re forging out into deep space – who knows what we’ll meet out there? If we can’t even accept a robot and some talking elephants, what good are we going to be when we meet something really strange?”
― Alastair Reynolds, On the Steel Breeze

“Well," she said, "I see it hasn't got a fuck of a lot better since I was away.”
― Alastair Reynolds , Redemption Ark

“At one time, the treatment for a certain kind of psychosis had been to push an ice pick up through the orbit of the eye, into the frontal lobe; the ice pick was then stirred around until it reduced the problematic brain tissue to non-functioning porridge.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Terminal World

“War was about yawning chasms of inactivity, punctuated by brief, screaming interludes of action. And in those brief, screaming interludes, events happened both quickly and with dreamlike slowness, every instant burned into memory.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Chasm City