Alastair Reynolds Quotes

Everything looked utterly normal, exactly as Thalia had expected save for the absence of a rampaging mob.

That was my plan. But there is an old saying about plans and war.
I would have done well to heed it.

For whatever reason, I am now fully conscious. Perhaps all beta-levels are capable of this, or perhaps my sheer connectional complexity ensured that I exceeded some state of critical mass. I have no idea. All I know is that I think, and therefore I’m exceedingly angry.

Half of all the great art and literature in existence went unrecognised during the lifetimes of its creators.

I ran an experiment and I got a result. That’s more useful to us than fifty years of theorising.

Kanu closed his eyes, opened them again, hoping that the world would have done the decent thing and changed into a less problematic version of itself.

You are that rarest of creatures: a man with the wisdom to see beyond his own time.

Don’t you start. It’s bad enough that one of us feels he could have done more. We’re human, Campion—that’s all it boils down to. Human and not nearly as clever as we thought we were when it counted. End of story. When they put up the gravestone for our species, that’ll be the epitaph.

Is he going to be okay?" Svetlana asked. "He was dead, Svieta," Axford said patiently. "Anything else has to count as an improvement.

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

War does strange things to truth.

We've never lied to you," McKinley said. "No," Bella said, "but you've done a damned good job of not correcting any of my assumptions.

I learnt the true meaning of what was euphemistically described as close-quarters combat. No line-of-sight particle-beam weapons now; no delayed-detonation nano-munitions. What close-quarters combat meant was something which would have been infinitely more recognisable to a soldier of a thousand years earlier: the screaming fury of human beings packed so close together that the only effective way to kill each other was with sharpened metal weapons: bayonets and daggers, or with hands around each other’s throats; fingers pressed into each other’s eye-sockets. The only way to survive was to disengage all higher brain-functions and regress to an animal state of mind.
So I did. And in doing so, I learned a deeper truth about war. She punished those who flirted with her by making them like herself. Once you opened the door to the animal, there was no shutting it.

The mere fact that there could be danger in this is fascination in itself; almost an incentive to push further. That’s how you feel, isn’t it? Every argument they could use against you would only strengthen your resolve. Because knowledge makes you hungry, and it’s a hunger you can’t resist, even if you know that what you’re feasting on could kill you.

Welcome to politics, Doctor. We don’t get to pick our allies. The best we can hope for is that we don’t despise them quite as much as our enemies.