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. Then centrifugal gravity took over, and with something close to majesty the skeletal spacecraft descended out of the repair bay as smoothly and elegantly as a falling chandelier.
Alastair Reynolds
#5. 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
#6. Might you show me how to project a schematic of the entire inner solar system? I appear to be unable to zoom out from the immediate neighbourhood of Paladin." "Access that sub-menu, then select the logarithmic scale factor," Nissa said. "Thank you - I should have seen that." The
Alastair Reynolds
#7. It was one of the oldest tricks of mob-management: give them a hate figure. The
Alastair Reynolds
#9. I am not cruel," he said. "Not in the sense you mean. But cruelty is a useful tool if one can only recognise the precise moment when it must be used.
Alastair Reynolds
#10. 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
#11. You worry that we're becoming monsters. Merlin, we already were monsters. You didn't make us any worse.
Alastair Reynolds
#12. All I do know is that in six hours I could be suffering from acute existence failure.
Alastair Reynolds
#15. It's one thing to be given a big boxful of theory and quite another to make an engine out of it.
Alastair Reynolds
#16. Quantum reality is a nest of snakes, Clavain, and we are already poking it with a very sharp stick.
Alastair Reynolds
#17. Can we drop the 'artificial intelligence'? It's a bit like me calling you a meat-based processing system.
Alastair Reynolds
#18. Wind snapped at me, warm and fragrant. The atmosphere was thick with pollen and micro-organisms, goading my body's ancient defences.
Alastair Reynolds
#19. It wasn't always about bravery or some shining inner goodness. It could just as easily be about the position of your name in the alphabet, the chemistry of your blood, or
Alastair Reynolds
#20. 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
#24. 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
#25. There's such a thing as free will, Tanner. You didn't have to go along with me, unless you want to admit your brain is ruled by your dick. And I didn't get the impression you regretted any of that.
Alastair Reynolds
#26. Names like clouds. Names like forests. Names like ever unfolding mathematical structures - names that begat themselves, in dreams of recursion. Names that split the world in two. Names that would drive a nail through your sanity.
Alastair Reynolds
#27. 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
#28. Where no man has gone before - who said that - William Shakespeare?"
"I've no idea.
Alastair Reynolds
#29. 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
#30. I think the danger with using the term 'trilogy' is that it sets up particular expectations in the reader's mind.
Alastair Reynolds
#31. 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
#34. Some promises are best broken. Trust me on this: I'm a politician.
Alastair Reynolds
#35. Humanity is an assemblage of information-processing entities, and in that regard you have potential.
Alastair Reynolds
#36. I'll argue to the death against stupid legislation, but some rules exist for a reason.
Alastair Reynolds
#37. Sooner or later everything boils down to trust. You just have to make that leap of faith.
Alastair Reynolds
#38. 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
#40. Having created these cognitively enhanced creatures, the safest option at the time appeared to be to launch them into interstellar space.
Alastair Reynolds
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. It was a mansion of ghosts and monsters, with ghouls in the shadows and demons scuttling behind the wainscotting.
Alastair Reynolds
#44. 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
#45. Life was a very odd thing indeed, he reflected, when you really thought about it.
Alastair Reynolds
#46. Without risk in our lives, we're scarcely better than machines ourselves.
Alastair Reynolds
#47. 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
#48. That,' Peregrine said, 'is civilisation. Not all who were rewarded deserved to be; not all who should have been were.
Alastair Reynolds
#49. Adapt and survive. Make do and mend. These were good mottos for a time traveller.
Alastair Reynolds
#50. You didn't weld it shut or anything like that?"
"Yes, stupid me, I forgot.
Alastair Reynolds
#51. Nothing had ever existed between us except the possibility of something, and now even that was over.
Alastair Reynolds
#53. They would continue to live in New Tiamaat, orbiting Crucible.
Alastair Reynolds
#54. There was a moment of absolute cosmic cold, as if a billion tiny doors had opened in every cell of his body, letting in the draught of creation.
Alastair Reynolds
#55. One of the big breakthroughs I had as a writer was when I stopped agonising over every word.
Alastair Reynolds
#56. 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
#57. Sluka shook her head. We're talking about them in the past tense, and we never even discussed them in the present. It's like their only reason for existing was so they could die.
Alastair Reynolds
#58. 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
#59. Everyone has their fulcrum, Chiku. You can bend anyone to any cause with the right timing.
Alastair Reynolds
#60. 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
#61. We don't own them, and we don't have any claims on moral superiority. But after all we've done to them in the past we do have an obligation to shepherd them through to better times.' He
Alastair Reynolds
#62. None of us is a monster, Chiku. We're all just trying to make the best of our singular natures.
Alastair Reynolds
#63. Life is precious. Infinitely so. Perhaps it takes a machine intelligence to appreciate that."
~"Understanding Space & Time
Alastair Reynolds
#64. We have worlds to save, Doctor Aziba."
"That sounds ... compelling," the physician allowed.
Alastair Reynolds
#65. 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
#66. This is life. It's not a dress rehearsal. If we don't do this now, we may as well start planning our own funerals.
Alastair Reynolds
#67. Qafzeh's algorithms - if implemented properly on a particular architecture of quantum computer - led to a net heat loss from the local universe. A cryo-arithmetic engine was in essence just a computer, running computational cycles. Unlike ordinary computers, however, it got colder the faster it ran.
Alastair Reynolds
#68. 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
#69. I'm fascinated by steam engines and with Victorian engineering generally, and as a corollary to that, I'm fascinated by the idea of long-lived technologies.
Alastair Reynolds
#70. Autocratic governments are masters of self-contradiction. They say one thing, do another.
Alastair Reynolds
#71. First rule of complex systems," I said. "You can't tell friends from enemies.
Alastair Reynolds
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. Believe me, when you're dealing with infectious alien mind parasites, I always find primitive is best. Then, calmly, almost as if it were a recognised form of verbal punctuation, she took aim with the needler and gutted a rat which had dared to stray into the corridor.
Alastair Reynolds
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. I'm not massively fond of right-wing nutters or war criminals.
Alastair Reynolds
#82. 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
#83. I think I've reduced the amount of blood in my caffeine system to an acceptable level.
Alastair Reynolds
#84. In less than twelve hours, Purslane's ship would be travelling so close to the speed of light that the fastest ship ever built would still need a hundred thousand years to catch up with her.
Alastair Reynolds
#85. Victory loses its meaning without the memory of what you've vanquished.
Alastair Reynolds
#86. observing the way the rig needed only occasional human intervention to stay locked on the road. Doubtless it could have managed with none at all, were it not for local union laws. Very
Alastair Reynolds
#87. Such was the nature of obsessions: no quarter given for the human cost.
Alastair Reynolds
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#94. 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
#95. The games enthralled the public and diverted their attentions from the Halo wars. And - unlike the arts - they could not be used as vehicles for subversion. For gamers like myself it was a near-utopian state of affairs. We were pampered and courted by the houses and made immensely rich.
Alastair Reynolds
#96. It was an exceedingly odd thing to see an elephant in a spacesuit.
Alastair Reynolds
#98. He was a thin, elegant-looking man with precise symmetrical features and the hushed, disapproving manner of a senior librarian.
Alastair Reynolds
#99. 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
#100. Volyova did not like planets at the best of times, and gas giants struck her as an unreasonable affront to human scale and frailty. In that respect, they were almost as bad as stars.
Alastair Reynolds
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