Alastair Reynolds Quotes

It was a numbers game, not a guaranteed method of avoiding being killed, but Clavain had been a soldier long enough to know that this was, ultimately, what most combat situations boiled down to.

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.

Nice girls don’t carry guns.

Is there anyone in Chasm City she hasn't deceived?" "Possibly, somewhere, but only as an extreme theoretical possibility.

There's a catch," Skellsgard said. "Another one? But of course there is. You know, I'm thinking I should start a collection.

Ideology is all there is." "Really? I would have thought there were many other human qualities worth considering. Fairness. Generosity. A sense of humour. A willingness to see the best in people, even those we do not automatically agree with.

Ghosts are not the souls of the dead, but the souls of people written out of history when history changes.

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.

Memo to himself: the one way to make people panic was to warn them not to.

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

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.

A single data point—even a single clutch of measurements—could not usually prove or disprove anything, but it might later turn out to play a vital role in a chain of argument, even if it was only in the biasing of some statistical distribution closer to one hypothesis than another. Science, as Naqi had long since realised, was as much a swarming, social process as it was something driven by ecstatic moments of personal discovery.
It was something she was proud to be part of.

In its purest distillation beauty had always been merciless.

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

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