Alastair Reynolds Quotes

The poor didn’t have them and so the rich flaunted them, the larger and more conspicuous the better.

I'll survive," Floyd said. "I'm a private detective. If I don't get clouted on the head at least once a week, I'm not doing my job properly.

That was the universe: you could beat it once, you could float a message in a bottle across half of eternity, but the universe would always find a way to have the last laugh.

Either you are a man of unusual ability, Thorn, or a man with a rather inadequate grasp of human nature. I just hope it’s the former.

Who was it who said that a wise man speaks when he has something to say, but a fool speaks because he must?

That's how it went, wasn't it Zebra?" "It might," she said. "If I happened to be colluding in your own delusions.

All her concerns, all her fears, began to feel trifling. It was just a trick of perspective, really, seeing things as they truly were.

I had never understood mathematics with any great agility, but now I sensed it as a hard grid of truth underlying everything: bones shining through the thin flesh of the world.

Is that as bad as it sounds?" Floyd asked. "No," Auger said. "It's worse. A lot worse.

We don’t aspire to genetic unity, no matter what your propagandists think. The pursuit of optima leads only to local minima. We honour our errors. We actively seek persistent disequilibrium.

But you can be sure there are pockets of wealth and influence, and I'm willing to wager that a few people are wealthier and more influential than they were before." "That's always the way with disasters," I said. "What?" "They're never bad news for everyone. Something nasty always rises to the top.

We were sowing so much misinformation that some of it came back and bit us.

“Tell me, scientist to scientist, do you honestly think it will work?”
“We won’t know until we try,” Naqi said. Any other answer would have been politically hazardous: too much optimism and the politicians would have started asking just why the expensive project was needed in the first place. Too much pessimism and they would ask exactly the same question.

I felt a terrible sadness open inside me, a void through which the winds from the end of the universe were blowing.

I had you down as a xenophobic zealot," Quillen said. "I didn't realize you were also a sadist." "We all have our hidden depths.