Alastair Reynolds Quotes

You wish things were different from the way they are. That’s a refrain as old as time. I’ve lived a long and strange sort of life, Kanu, and I’ve known that feeling a few times. Generally it’s best to accept that things are exactly as bad as they look. At least that way you know it’s time to start digging your way out.

There are certain truths that, in themselves, are as dangerous as any advanced technology.

I know what you're feeling," Meroka said. "You're thinking, this was my little adventure, it was all revolving around me. And now it's not. You're just a detail, swept up in the stuff she's making happen. Welcome to the way most of us spend our lives feeling, Cutter. We're just turds swirling our way down the pipe.

I will say this, though—it's a very odd thing not to be conscious. To be—to all intents and purposes—dead. Neither gathering nor generating information, as cold and changeless as eternity. How do you humans live with the thought of that hanging over every moment of your pitifully short existences?" "We don't," Kanu said. "We just get on with it.

Oh, I’m not perfect—not by a long stretch. I just make the rest of you look bad.

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.

I had work to be getting on with. I’ve always had work to be getting on with. It’s what the universe was put there for: to give me things to do.

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.

Wonderful, isn't it?" "Wonderful and a little spooky." "Like all the best things in the universe.

Only trying to make conversation, friend." "Don't bother—it's an overrated activity at the best of times.

What you encountered was an abomination, a military intelligence. It was designed to be insidious and spiteful and inimical to life, and it wasn’t smart enough to have a conscience.

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.

Some promises are best broken. Trust me on this: I’m a politician.

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'm hoping no one will be quite that stupid," Sparver said. "Then again, this is baseline humans we're dealing with.