Alastair Reynolds Quotes

The Jugglers store patterns, but they seldom show any sign of comprehending actual content. We’re dealing with a mindless biological archiving system, a museum without a curator.

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.

Civilisations beyond number had risen from obscurity, considering themselves masters of all creation, before fading back into the footnotes of history.

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.

Even time travel becomes normal when it’s your day job.

I was born in a house with a million rooms, built on a small, airless world on the edge of an empire of light and commerce that the adults called the Golden Hour, for a reason I did not yet grasp.

They had hardly ever spoken of her life before the the day they met in Belém. It was what they had both agreed on, a relationship built on a solid foundation of mutual ignorance.

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

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.

They might have their airships and machine guns, but superstition wasn’t something that went away just because you had engines and bullets.

Relativity distorted classical expectations in a way that Clavain still did not find entirely intuitive. Slam two objects towards each other, each with individual velocities just below light-speed, and the classical result for their closing velocity would be the sum of their individual speeds: just under twice the speed of light. Yet the true result, confirmed with numbing precision, was that the objects saw each other approach with a combined speed that was still just below the speed of light. Similarly, the relativistic closing velocity for two objects moving towards each other with individual speeds of one-half of light-speed was not light-speed itself, but eight-tenths of it. It was the way the universe was put together, and yet it was not something the human mind had evolved to accept.

I don't trust you." "Of course you don't. I know I wouldn't. And I'm not asking you to. I'm not putting you in a situation in which your trust of me is even remotely relevant. I'm just pointing a gun to your head and giving you orders.

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

It’s always easier to hate than to forgive, isn’t it?

The future might have been crammed with miracles and wonders, but it also offered truly awesome opportunities for screwing up.