Alastair Reynolds Quotes

She worked quickly, but not because she considered the commission beneath her. It was simply the way she always approached her art. Preparation, forethought, hours of meditation, then an explosion of swift and decisive action, like the quick and merciful descent of a sword. Execution, in every sense of the word.

You’ll have to excuse our customs and immigration staff: they preach courtesy and respect while demonstrating exactly the opposite.

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.

How did you…pass the time?" Sunday asked. "You couldn't just ching out of it, could you?" "We had a different form of chinging," Eunice said. "An earlier type of virtual-reality technology, much more robust and completely unaffected by time lag. You may have heard of it. We called it 'reading.'

In a flash she understood herself for what she was: an exceedingly smart monkey. She was a smart monkey who had travelled across interplanetary space in a thing made by other smart monkeys. And the fact of this was enough to make her laugh out loud, as if she had suddenly, belatedly, grasped the punchline to a very involved joke.
I’m the punchline, Sunday thought. I’m the period, the full stop at the end of an immensely long and convoluted chain of happenstance and contingency stretching from the discovery of fire down in the Olduvai Gorge, through the inventions of language and paper and the wheel, through all the unremembered centuries to…this. This condition. Being brought out of hibernation aboard a spaceship orbiting another planet. Being alive in the twenty-second century. Being a thing with a central nervous system complex enough to understand the concept of being a thing with a central nervous system. Simply being.
Consider all the inanimate matter in the universe, all the dumb atoms, all the mindless molecules, all the oblivious dust grains and pebbles and rocks and iceballs and worlds and stars, all the unthinking galaxies and superclusters, wheeling through the oblivious time-haunted megaparsecs of the cosmic supervoid. In all that immensity, she had somehow contrived to be a human being, a microscopically tiny, cosmically insignificant bundle of information-processing systems, wired to a mind more structurally complex than the Milky Way itself, maybe even more complex than the rest of the whole damned universe.
She had threaded the needle of creation and stabbed the cosmic bullseye.

The boundary between art and kitsch was negotiable, even porous.

The air crackled with rivalry and the potential for swift backstabbing.
Geoffrey hadn’t sensed anything like it since his last academic conference.

She looked at him, marvelling. “Sometimes it’s as if you’re living a century behind the rest of us.”
“Elephants don’t care what century it is. They care what season it is.”

We're pushing into deep space now—Trans-Neptunian, the inner boundary of the Kuiper belt, and we've even got machines in the Oort cloud. That's where it gets stickier. If we're going to do anything useful out there, we'll need smart machines and lots of them. Machines that break right through the existing cognition thresholds, into post-artilect computation. Human-level thinkers that can live with us, be our equals as well as our workers." "You're not sounding any less scary than you were five minutes ago," Geoffrey said. "Look, in a thousand years, the difference between people and machines…It's going to seem about as relevant as the difference between Protestants and Catholics: some ludicrous relic of Dark Age thinking.

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.

She was pointing into the empty, angel-less heavens beyond.
Everything else. The universe.

It was easy to sound that confident; less easy to believe it in his heart. They had got this far did not give them an automatic guarantee of success. The world did not work like that. It took pleasure in punishing the cocksure.

Hopefully they’ll accept me for what I am, not what I was. That’s all we can ever hope for, isn’t it?

Welcome to politics, Doctor. We don’t get to pick our allies. The best we can hope for is that we don’t despise them quite as much as our enemies.

Do you think it means anything?" "Probably not," Ricasso said, wiping his dust-smeared hands on his knees. "I'm all for looking for meaning in ancient texts. But now and then you have to just accept the fact that you're dealing with so much religious gibberish.