Alastair Reynolds Quotes

His parents had abdicated responsibility to an illusion.

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

Haven't you ever heard of morale-building?" Khouri had asked. "Heard of it," Volyova said. "Don't happen to agree with it. Would you rather be happy and dead, or scared and alive?

She worked quickly, but not because she considered the commission beneath her. It was simply the way she always approached her art. Preparation, forethought, hours of meditation, then an explosion of swift and decisive action, like the quick and merciful descent of a sword. Execution, in every sense of the word.

The sense of squandered possibility, of better paths now lost to them all, filled him with a sudden rising sadness. He wondered if it was too late to make something better of their world.

They had been in love, desperately in love, but the universe cared nothing for the vicissitudes of the human heart.

So you've no qualms." "Qualms?" Merlin set down the papers he had been leafing through. "I've so many qualms they're in danger of self-organizing. I occasionally have a thought that isn't a qualm. But I'll tell you this. Sometimes you just have to do the obvious thing. They have an item I need, and there's a favor I can do for them. It's that simple. Not everything in the universe is a riddle.

She was usually caught with her back to us, a distant figure standing on some cliff or high building with one hand on her hip and another shielding her eyes from the sun, lost in the rapture of scale and scenery, drunk on the very idea of being human, a monkey who had hit the big time.

“You always did think like an engineer, Svieta.”
She nodded. It was only hours later that she realised he had not necessarily meant it as a compliment.

And you do not think that this is possible?" "I'll believe in anything when I see evidence for it.

Something worse." After a silence Dreyfus said: "If there's one thing I've learned, it's that there's always something worse." "Yes. Odd that that should be what keeps us going, but there it is. We take our comforts where we may.

If my years as a shatterling had taught me anything, it was that not all questions had answers. Societies had reduced themselves to radioactive dust because they could not accept that single unpalatable truth.

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

She looked at him, marvelling. “Sometimes it’s as if you’re living a century behind the rest of us.”
“Elephants don’t care what century it is. They care what season it is.”

I'd argue with you, but I suspect it would feel a bit like arguing with myself." "Futile?" "Boring.