Top 100 Alastair Reynolds Quotes
#2. I was never strong at maths, but I eventually got onto a university physics/astronomy course, and that led on to my Ph.D. and eventual employment.
Alastair Reynolds
#3. Banking and Prosperity in the Thirteenth Occupation or even A Child's Treasury of Economics or The Young Person's Illustrated Omnibus of Fiscal Prudence.
Alastair Reynolds
#4. And the knowledge that humanity was not alone in the universe would be as relevant to most as the knowledge that protons were built of quarks.
Alastair Reynolds
#5. It was one of the oldest tricks of mob-management: give them a hate figure. The
Alastair Reynolds
#6. 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
#7. You worry that we're becoming monsters. Merlin, we already were monsters. You didn't make us any worse.
Alastair Reynolds
#8. All I do know is that in six hours I could be suffering from acute existence failure.
Alastair Reynolds
#10. It's one thing to be given a big boxful of theory and quite another to make an engine out of it.
Alastair Reynolds
#11. Can we drop the 'artificial intelligence'? It's a bit like me calling you a meat-based processing system.
Alastair Reynolds
#12. Wind snapped at me, warm and fragrant. The atmosphere was thick with pollen and micro-organisms, goading my body's ancient defences.
Alastair Reynolds
#13. She longed to touch it, to stroke her fingers through that atmosphere, cleaving white billowing clouds and glittering salty seas, until she felt the hard scabbed crust beneath them.
Alastair Reynolds
#16. 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
#17. I really struggle to pinpoint whether I became a scientist because I like science fiction, or did I gravitate to science fiction because I identified strongly with scientists.
Alastair Reynolds
#18. Where no man has gone before - who said that - William Shakespeare?"
"I've no idea.
Alastair Reynolds
#19. Then they'd be wrong. It's only our deeds that make us evil, Tanner; they're what define us, nothing else, not our intentions or feelings. But what are a few bad deeds compared to a life, especially the kinds of lives we can live now?
Alastair Reynolds
#20. I think the danger with using the term 'trilogy' is that it sets up particular expectations in the reader's mind.
Alastair Reynolds
#21. 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
#24. Some promises are best broken. Trust me on this: I'm a politician.
Alastair Reynolds
#25. I'll argue to the death against stupid legislation, but some rules exist for a reason.
Alastair Reynolds
#26. Sooner or later everything boils down to trust. You just have to make that leap of faith.
Alastair Reynolds
#27. She hesitated, aware that an ill-judged phrase might anger Triumvir Hegazi; not that she particularly cared. Dared she call it the Melding Plague, now that the Yellowstoners had given it a name? Perhaps that would be unwise.
Alastair Reynolds
#29. Having created these cognitively enhanced creatures, the safest option at the time appeared to be to launch them into interstellar space.
Alastair Reynolds
#30. You look older, son." "Yes, well, some of us have to get on with the business of being alive in the entropic universe.
Alastair Reynolds
#31. For a moment I think we were turned into information, and that in that instant we were linked to every other piece of information ever known; every thought ever thought, or at least ever captured by the light.
Alastair Reynolds
#32. It was a mansion of ghosts and monsters, with ghouls in the shadows and demons scuttling behind the wainscotting.
Alastair Reynolds
#33. 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
#34. Life was a very odd thing indeed, he reflected, when you really thought about it.
Alastair Reynolds
#35. Without risk in our lives, we're scarcely better than machines ourselves.
Alastair Reynolds
#36. Only an evolutionary eyeblink separated Kanu from the savannah, and that was just as true for the Risen. Their minds might be fixed on the stars, but their bodies were only a footstep from the dust and heat of Amboseli.
Alastair Reynolds
#37. Adapt and survive. Make do and mend. These were good mottos for a time traveller.
Alastair Reynolds
#38. You didn't weld it shut or anything like that?"
"Yes, stupid me, I forgot.
Alastair Reynolds
#39. Nothing had ever existed between us except the possibility of something, and now even that was over.
Alastair Reynolds
#41. They would continue to live in New Tiamaat, orbiting Crucible.
Alastair Reynolds
#42. One of the big breakthroughs I had as a writer was when I stopped agonising over every word.
Alastair Reynolds
#43. We should have brought a torch," he was saying. "We have been to Saturn and back and we didn't bring a torch.
Alastair Reynolds
#44. You're confident he'll have found him, then?"
"Well, no. I didn't sat that."
"If there's one thing I hate," Volyova said, looking coldly at the other Triumvir, "it's mindless optimism.
Alastair Reynolds
#45. Everyone has their fulcrum, Chiku. You can bend anyone to any cause with the right timing.
Alastair Reynolds
#46. But you will come to regret this, Abigail. This won't be like one of the memories that fritters away into nothing when you come out of that game. This will leave a stain. You'll carry for it for ever, when you could have had a few more years of blissful innocence. Are you sure, now?
Alastair Reynolds
#47. Life is precious. Infinitely so. Perhaps it takes a machine intelligence to appreciate that."
~"Understanding Space & Time
Alastair Reynolds
#48. We have worlds to save, Doctor Aziba."
"That sounds ... compelling," the physician allowed.
Alastair Reynolds
#49. I'm always a little bit cautious around invented terminology because so much science fiction is off-putting to the uninitiated. You open up the first page, and it's full of all these made-up words.
Alastair Reynolds
#50. First rule of complex systems," I said. "You can't tell friends from enemies.
Alastair Reynolds
#51. We've had science fiction novels where China is dominant; we've had novels where India is dominant, and I suppose it's all about getting away from that cliched old tired idea that the future belongs to the West.
Alastair Reynolds
#52. When I look back at many of the moments of wonder, awe, or terror that I've got from science fiction, it's often been because I've been put in the head of one of the characters.
Alastair Reynolds
#53. Has a control system so perilously close to intelligence that a government agent must be on hand at all times, ready to destroy the machine if it slips over the threshold into consciousness.
Alastair Reynolds
#56. I think the deeper we go, the less likelihood we'll have of being recognised as something unwanted. It's like the human body - the greatest density of pain receptors lies in the skin.
Alastair Reynolds
#57. I'm not massively fond of right-wing nutters or war criminals.
Alastair Reynolds
#58. 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
#59. I think I've reduced the amount of blood in my caffeine system to an acceptable level.
Alastair Reynolds
#60. Such was the nature of obsessions: no quarter given for the human cost.
Alastair Reynolds
#61. That she had loved Sylveste because he was such a self-important bastard and made something noble of being a self-important bastard, did it with such utter aplomb that it became a kind of virtue, like the wearing of sackcloth
Alastair Reynolds
#62. I always say that keeping abreast of science should never be seen as a chore. It should be something you do naturally. I don't sit there reading 'New Scientist,' putting post-it notes next to ideas.
Alastair Reynolds
#63. Arethusa liked to call us Poseidon's Children. Orphans of the storm. We'd endured the worst the world could throw at us, the worst consequences of our own stupidity, and came through ... ready to face the dawn. But there are always more storms, Chiku.
Alastair Reynolds
#64. Nonetheless, we offer our forgiveness. What is the point in being a superior civilisation if you can't do that once in a while? I
Alastair Reynolds
#65. 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
#67. Elephants have a theory of mind - they can think into the head of another elephant and infer their knowledge of the world, including errors and omissions of knowledge. That puts them above all but a handful of species - a few primates, some very smart birds and cetaceans.
Alastair Reynolds
#68. It was an exceedingly odd thing to see an elephant in a spacesuit.
Alastair Reynolds
#70. He was a thin, elegant-looking man with precise symmetrical features and the hushed, disapproving manner of a senior librarian.
Alastair Reynolds
#71. I am playing in a playground that's already been played in. I am always aware that a lot of the furniture in science fiction is second hand.
Alastair Reynolds
#72. The next time you need a piece of apparently obscure information, try asking a science fiction writer. You might be surprised.
Alastair Reynolds
#73. Birth and death frame a life, give it shape. Without that border it just becomes a kind of sprawling mess, a thing with no edge, no definition, no centre.
Alastair Reynolds
#74. Khouri had never really given much thought to the slowness of light. There was nothing in the universe that moved faster ... but, as she now saw, it was glacial compared to the speed that would be needed to keep their love alive.
Alastair Reynolds
#76. History is what we write, not what we remember. Why should we tarnish the memory of our planet by enshrining our less then noble deeds?
Alastair Reynolds
#77. Clavain was looking at a hyperpig: a genetic chimera of pig and human.
Alastair Reynolds
#81. If there's a story I absolutely cannot tell without faster-than-light travel, then I am quite prepared to accept it - even though I don't personally believe it is possible.
Alastair Reynolds
#82. Do you have to sound so damned indifferent to it all? Here we are talking about how we're likely to be dead in a few hours and you're acting like it's only a minor inconvenience.
~"Spirey & the Queen
Alastair Reynolds
#83. There was another intelligence out there, close enough to touch. And even if they were now gone, then the mere existence of their handiwork was wonder enough to fundamentally change humanity's view of the universe.
Alastair Reynolds
#84. Half of all the great art and literature in existence went unrecognised during the lifetimes of its creators.
Alastair Reynolds
#85. When you're writing stuff that's already clotted with neologisms and trying to get across fairly abstruse concepts, you're already putting a heavy burden on the reader.
Alastair Reynolds
#86. This is a kindness, a thing done to another human being for no reason other than compassion. A private, dignified act of basic human decency, which history, being the bastard that it is, will probably neglect to commemorate. You
Alastair Reynolds
#87. I pushed my hand into the open slot of the maker and closed my fingers around the sculpted handle of the energy-pistol. The newly minted weapon had the peculiar heft of something crammed with intricate machinery at abnormal densities.
Alastair Reynolds
#89. Dimly
at first wary that it was merely a dislodged fragment of the dream
she remembered Resurgam. And then, slowly, events returned, not as a tidal wave, or even as as landslide, but as a slow, squelching slippage: a disembowelment of the past.
Alastair Reynolds
#91. There has been much debate on the matter, but the present state of understanding is that no useful information can ever emerge from a black hole."
~"Understanding Space & Time
Alastair Reynolds
#92. Nightside, cities glistened in chains, and a spray of tinkertoy habitats girdled the planet. Gossamer starbridges reached from the equator towards orbit.
Alastair Reynolds
#93. It's not how far you've come that matters. It's where you've come from.
Alastair Reynolds
#94. I thought we were better then this."
"We're human. Be thankful we've moved on from clubbing each other's brains out every five minutes.
Alastair Reynolds
#95. I couldn't ever write a straight crime novel: there'd be an intrusion of weirdness at some point.
Alastair Reynolds
#96. But a constant, low-level background of crime may help a society become more robust, more resilient.
Alastair Reynolds
#97. Behold, Mr. Clavain: Chasm City. A place I have to come to know and, while not actually love, perhaps not to detest with quite the same missionary zeal as when I first arrived.
Alastair Reynolds
#98. The cards always look different when it's your turn to play them; loaded with subtly different possibilities.
Alastair Reynolds
#99. 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
#100. It was that same old spiralling argument, and again he didn't have the energy to fight his corner. 'When you put it like that, I guess it doesn't sound too ridiculous.
Alastair Reynolds
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