Alastair Reynolds Quotes

He’s not really a religious man, but he knows which side his bread’s buttered on. The churches pay his salary, so he doesn’t want anyone rocking the boat with unorthodox rumours.

But when she tried to say something, the words always seemed trite and inadequate. Nothing measured up. When any moment might be their last, there was nothing she could ever imagine saying that had the necessary dignity to fill that instant. Silence was better. Silence had its own dignity.

If I’ve learned one thing in my long existence, it’s that hesitation gets you nowhere.

Open your story-cube on the way home and ask it to tell you about causality violation. I did once, because I asked the same question you did. Why should I be limited? What right does the universe have to say what I can and can’t do? I’m intelligent. The universe is just a lot of hydrogen and dirt, going through the motions. But in this instance the universe has the final say.

Loosen up. I need reverence like I need a skateboard.

The problem was, although I was as certain as I could be that I was right, I could offer nothing to bolster my arguments.

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

Given the evidence at our disposal, only a fool would put any faith in the organic and the machine living harmoniously for the rest of time.

Hopefully they’ll accept me for what I am, not what I was. That’s all we can ever hope for, isn’t it?

What you encountered was an abomination, a military intelligence. It was designed to be insidious and spiteful and inimical to life, and it wasn’t smart enough to have a conscience.

Such hopes now seemed ludicrous in their naivety, like trying to stop a bulldozer with a feather.

He had never lost that mingled combination of awe and terror that welled up in him when confronted by the routinely huge distances of space.

The world had absorbed the dizzying lessons of modern science easily enough, hadn’t it? Reality was a trick of cognition, an illusion woven by the brain. Beneath the apparently solid skin of the world lay a fizzing unreality of quantum mechanics, playing out on a warped and surreal Salvador Dali landscape. Ghost worlds peeled away from the present with every decision. The universe itself would one day simmer down to absolute entropic stasis, the absolute and literal end of time itself. No action, no memory of an action, no trace of a memory, could endure for ever. Every human deed, from the smallest kindness to the grandest artistic achievement, was ultimately pointless.
But it wasn’t as if people went around thinking about that when they had lovers to meet, menus to choose from, birthdays to remember. The humdrum concerns of normal life trumped the miraculous every time.…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.

It was bad, but it was some other slightly less piquant flavour of bad.

You seem upset by the fact that we're hated and feared." "It does give one pause for thought.