Alastair Reynolds Quotes

Autocratic governments are masters of self-contradiction. They say one thing, do another.

Once, they would have meant something to Svetlana, but now all she felt was a faint prickly of recollection. Fluency with mathematics—in the context of any kind of engineering discipline or physical science—was a use-it-or-lose-it skill.

Grafenwalder shoots a sidelong glance at Ursula Goodglass, wondering what their marriage must be like. Clearly sex isn’t in the cards, but he doubts that it was ever the main interest in their lives. Games, especially those of prestige and subterfuge, are amongst the chief entertainments of the Rust Belt moneyed.

We're pushing into deep space now—Trans-Neptunian, the inner boundary of the Kuiper belt, and we've even got machines in the Oort cloud. That's where it gets stickier. If we're going to do anything useful out there, we'll need smart machines and lots of them. Machines that break right through the existing cognition thresholds, into post-artilect computation. Human-level thinkers that can live with us, be our equals as well as our workers." "You're not sounding any less scary than you were five minutes ago," Geoffrey said. "Look, in a thousand years, the difference between people and machines…It's going to seem about as relevant as the difference between Protestants and Catholics: some ludicrous relic of Dark Age thinking.

You owned the world when you were a young man, felt it like it was fashioned to fit your hands. You could do anything with it you wanted to. But the world kept changing, and sooner or later there came a day when it didn’t feel like you were the one the world was interested in any more.

The air crackled with rivalry and the potential for swift backstabbing.
Geoffrey hadn’t sensed anything like it since his last academic conference.

Believe me, Kanu—the one thing you don’t do in emergencies is think things through. Thinking things through gets you a headstone and a nice epitaph. She thought things through. See how that worked out for her.

There was something about the cocksure confidence of that statement that gave Auger goose pimples. It was like an invitation to fate.

She was pointing into the empty, angel-less heavens beyond.
Everything else. The universe.

They’re your children. The more you try to force them to be like you, the more they’re going to flare off in different directions like wild fireworks, the more they’re going to surprise and disappoint you.

She would worry, just as you worry. 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.

Is there anyone or anything in this city which can't be bought?" I said, slipping him a note. "Yeah," the man said, laughing quietly. "But I'm not it.

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.

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.

Sorry, Campion, but we can’t trust Lady Luck any more. Lately she’s taken to pissing on us from a great height.