Alastair Reynolds Quotes

You owned the world when you were a young man, felt it like it was fashioned to fit your hands. You could do anything with it you wanted to. But the world kept changing, and sooner or later there came a day when it didn’t feel like you were the one the world was interested in any more.

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

It was the wrong approach. But it was the only way we—they—could see at the time. So we mustn’t mock them for their mistakes. In two hundred years, someone will be just as quick to mock us for ours, if we’re not careful.

The universe always feels old, though. That’s a universal truth, a universal fact of life. It felt old for her, already cobwebbed by history. Hard for us to grasp, I know. Human civilisation, it’s just the last scratch on the last scratch on the last scratch, on the last layer of everything. We’re noise. Dirt. We haven’t begun to leave a trace.

The only thing driving us on was greed.
Fucking greed. The only thing in the universe stronger than fear.

But you know what? I don’t care If transferring your anger onto me helps you, go ahead. I was the billionaire CEO of a global company. I was doing something wrong if I didn’t wake up with a million knives in my back.

You're quite right: that theory is taken a bit less seriously." "But it isn't discredited, is it?" "You can't discredit an untestable hypothesis.

Still don't trust us?" "First rule of complex systems," I said. "You can't tell friends from enemies.

Ghosts are not the souls of the dead, but the souls of people written out of history when history changes.

Truth is truth, no matter who else believes it.

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

The old murals came from the heart," Zima said. "I painted on a huge scale because that was what the subject matter seemed to demand." "It was good work," I said. "It was hack work. Huge, loud, demanding, popular, but ultimately soulless. Just because it came from the heart didn't make it good.

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.

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

Is he dead?" Irravel asked.
"Depends what you mean by dead.