Alastair Reynolds Quotes

We don't have enough evidence to decide either way," Ricasso said, "so for now we may as well keep open minds.

I take it you're not a believer, Meroka?" "Are you?" "I don't believe." He paused theatrically. "In anything. I question. I doubt. I doubt and I doubt consistently and systematically. It's called thinking scientifically." "I hope you understand what the fuck that means," Meroka said, because I sure don't." "I wouldn't expect you to, my dear. The world isn't exactly conducive to scientific thinking. Not in its present condition. But it's changing, and so must we. Those of us who can, anyway.

This was a watering hole, and watering holes drew the hungry as well as the parched.

I’m not asking you to open your mind to all manner of nonsense, Doctor, merely to allow for the possibility of things you might previously have dismissed, or failed to give any consideration to whatsoever. Such as the fact that the world was not always this way, and by implication doesn’t have to be this way in the future.

I had you down as a xenophobic zealot," Quillen said. "I didn't realize you were also a sadist." "We all have our hidden depths.

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.

And you do not think that this is possible?" "I'll believe in anything when I see evidence for it.

They might have their airships and machine guns, but superstition wasn’t something that went away just because you had engines and bullets.

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?

Do you see us slavering for revenge, that most pointlessly biological of imperatives?

We were sowing so much misinformation that some of it came back and bit us.

Don’t you start. It’s bad enough that one of us feels he could have done more. We’re human, Campion—that’s all it boils down to. Human and not nearly as clever as we thought we were when it counted. End of story. When they put up the gravestone for our species, that’ll be the epitaph.

Given the evidence at our disposal, only a fool would put any faith in the organic and the machine living harmoniously for the rest of time.

They’re your children. The more you try to force them to be like you, the more they’re going to flare off in different directions like wild fireworks, the more they’re going to surprise and disappoint you.

Sorry, Campion, but we can’t trust Lady Luck any more. Lately she’s taken to pissing on us from a great height.