Alastair Reynolds Quotes

Even godlike aliens have to act rationally—don't they?" "I wouldn't know," she said. "I can't recall ever meeting any.

Anxiety is a useful tool: it forces us to make plans. But when too much anxiety freezes us into indecision, it needs checking.

Auger could not help marvelling at the experience of being inside the ALS sphere and seeing her world as it should have been. This was an earth that had never known nuclear war, or runaway climatic catastrophe, or smart weather, or a Nanocaust. The sight of it made her want to weep. No image had ever come close to the heartbreaking beauty of this small blue world, a beauty all the more acute now that she knew how exquisitely fragile it was. It was the beauty of a butterfly’s wing.

“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 central defect of the human mind," Custine said, "is its unfortunate habit of seeing patterns where none exist. Of course, that is also its chief asset." "But sometimes a very dangerous one.

“How are the internal complications, anyway? Aren’t the other branches of government getting a little suspicious about all these machinations?”
“Let’s just say that one or two discreet assassinations may still have to be performed,” Khouri said.

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

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.

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.

I have only your word for that." "Yes," the glass man said, "that's rather the point. There's going to have to be a lot more trust from this time forward. Why don't we start as we mean to go on?

Are you impressed?" Goma dared ask. "I don't really do impressed. But consider yourselves the recipients of grudging approval.

She must have walked through life with men like him falling at her feet, squashing them underfoot like autumn leaves. It probably happened so often that all she noticed was that nice crunching sound.

Some people get it. Most people never will.
But that’s art.

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

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.