Quotes from Alastair Reynolds

Oh, come on, Fura." Her eyes were wide with anticipation. I knew she'd had a glass of wine when we came in but there was nothing foggy or reddened about them. "We're a stone's throw from Neural Alley. I've got some quoins. Let's go and live a little.

I suppose I'd better …" he was saying, making a show of letting everyone know he was at least considering getting involved, even though he was happier behind a desk than wrestling with drunks.

While there were still children in the universe, and while children could still be enchanted by something as simple and wonderful as a flower, there was still a reason to keep looking, a reason to keep believing.

It took time for light to reach the Eye from distant galaxies. The further out the Eye looked, the further it looked back into the history of the universe. Galaxies ten million light years away were glimpsed as they were ten million years earlier; those a billion light years away offered a window into the universe when it was a billion years younger than the present epoch.

Clavain was looking at a hyperpig: a genetic chimera of pig and human.

Calvin raised his fingers in lazy acknowledgement. "So . . ." he said. "The shit's about to match coordinates with the fan.

Clavain looked around the room, taking in the gruesome menagerie of wraithlike seniors, wizened elders and obscene glass-bottled end-state Conjoiners. They were all hanging on his answer, even the visible brains seeming to hesitate in their wheezing pulsations.

No," I said emphatically. "Not in a million years. I might not be human. I might be nothing more than a set of algorithms, running on a spacesuit with a corpse inside it. But I'm not a monster.

Nonetheless, we offer our forgiveness. What is the point in being a superior civilisation if you can't do that once in a while?

I want to make sense of the world, Doctor. I want to undo the screws, take off its elegant face, glimpse the glittering movement, poke around in the gears and then decide if it's broken or not. Then I want to know if there is anything we can do to put it back together again. There may not be, but at least we'd have the satisfaction of knowing.' ' We'd be satisfied by our own impotence?' ' We won't know until we try

It was good to be loved, good to love another human being – even in the belly of a starship arrowing for unmapped space.

Daleks scared the hell out of me, to the point where I wouldn't go round to another boy's house because he had Dalek wallpaper in his bedroom.

Dreams of warp drives and hyperspace are just that - dreams.

There are similarities between historical novels and science fiction. Being thrown into the Napoleonic Wars is just as much of a different world as space.

Doomsday cults flourished in the damp, inviting loam of fear, like so many black orchids. People spoke of End Times, convinced that they were living through the final days.

No. He had a few fruitcake sympathisers, of course—but there was nothing ecclesiastical about it. That came afterwards. The Santiago was largely secular, but they couldn't engineer religion out of the human psyche that easily. They took what Sky had done and fused his deeds with what they chose to remember from home; saving this and discarding that as they saw fit. It took a few generations until they had all the details worked out, but then there was no stopping them.

But people designed and built the bridge." "Under God's will. Don't you understand? It's nothing you can argue with, Tanner. Give up now.

we take our victories where we find them, and accept our defeats with grace and patience.

we had evolved to grub around within a few kilometres of the same village, in the same time zone, under the same fixed stars.

But the trouble with simulations is that they put up with far too much shit.

there's a strength in not being strong.

Life was indeed a continuous lesson in finding ways to be less troubled by certain things, so that we might make room for new concerns, which arrived with the promptness and regularity of mail coaches.

Somewhere around 2136, various lines of development had collided. What had once been servile Borderline Intelligences had jumped the tracks into genuine sentience. The luminously clever engines of Transgressive intelligence had been much too clever, much too willing to oblige. In an instant, humanity had found itself in possession of tools powerful enough to remake entire worlds, but equally capable of shattering them to dust.

Where no man has gone before - who said that - William Shakespeare?" "I've no idea.