Alastair Reynolds Quotes

I’m fed up with everyone being lied to just because the administration thinks it’s in our best interests not to know all the facts.

“But of course, you don’t believe in the existence of sin, do you?”
“I believe in the existence of reckless stupidity,” Rashmika replied.

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

Is he dangerous? "Anyone who lies for a living is dangerous.

“Tell me, scientist to scientist, do you honestly think it will work?”
“We won’t know until we try,” Naqi said. Any other answer would have been politically hazardous: too much optimism and the politicians would have started asking just why the expensive project was needed in the first place. Too much pessimism and they would ask exactly the same question.

The Fascists got what they deserved," Floyd said. "My husband lived long enough to see those monsters come to come to power. He saw through their lies and promises, but he also knew that they spoke to something nasty and squalid in the human spirit. Something in all of us. We want to hate those who are not like us. All we need is an excuse, a whisper in the ear.

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

You’ve been good to me, Inigo. But I really am like the weather. You can admire me, even love me, in your way, but I can’t love you back. To me you’re like a photograph. I can see right through you, examine you from all angles. You amuse me. But you don’t have enough depth ever to fascinate me.

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

Loosen up. I need reverence like I need a skateboard.

She rapped on for a while about how the nineties milieu was best addressed as a system of infections: sexual illnesses, rogue advertising slogans, computer viruses, proliferating junk mail…the kind of jive that had spread into all the glossy style magazines, as if, she mused, the viral paradigm was a metavirus in its own right.

I worry that it's me they're really after." "You don't exist. At the risk of wounding your ego, not everyone in the known universe is obsessed with you and your secret history.

I gather you were all too busy killing each other." "That's a fairly reductive summary of our history, but I don't suppose it's too far from the truth.

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.

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.