Quotes from Alastair Reynolds

But without fallibility there is no art. And without art there is no truth.

There has been much debate on the matter, but the present state of understanding is that no useful information can ever emerge from a black hole." ~"Understanding Space & Time

You're confident he'll have found him, then?" "Well, no. I didn't sat that." "If there's one thing I hate," Volyova said, looking coldly at the other Triumvir, "it's mindless optimism.

I wish to have both things in my life: adventure and comfort.

The trouble with the dead, Triumvir Ilia Volyova thought, was that they had no real idea when to shut up.

That's what happens when you've had great success in life—when you've achieved the one goal you always desired. You lose a sense of purpose. Your smallest anxieties fester and magnify. Your fears turn inward, and attach themselves to irrational concerns.

Could kindness – by only ever taking little steps – twist itself into the worst kind of cruelty?

Then they'd be wrong. It's only our deeds that make us evil, Tanner; they're what define us, nothing else, not our intentions or feelings. But what are a few bad deeds compared to a life, especially the kinds of lives we can live now?

Masai and elephants. The rest is dust.

Everything depends on everything else, doesn't it? That's interconnectivity for you – it's a bitch.

The ship had always been vast and intricate, its topology as unfathomable as the abandoned subway system of a deserted metropolis. It had been a ship haunted by many ghosts, not all of which were necessarily cybernetic or imaginary. Winds had sighed up and down its kilometres of empty corridors. It was infested with rats, stalked by machines and madmen. It had moods and fevers, like an old house.

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.

All data is stale. The photons reaching your eyes are stale. They tell you that you are looking at something real, but you have no information that the objects before you still exist. They may have vanished into oblivion the instant those photons took wing.

I'll die? I'm going to die anyway, so what difference does it make?"She paused, allowing the melancholic chorus of the machines to swell and fill the room. "Probably by the end of the week. And all I've got to look forward to is the inside of this room or the view out this window. At least let me see something different." ~"Understanding Space & Time

Arethusa liked to call us Poseidon's Children. Orphans of the storm. We'd endured the worst the world could throw at us, the worst consequences of our own stupidity, and came through ... ready to face the dawn. But there are always more storms, Chiku.

Just because it came from the heart didn't make it good.

He was a thin, elegant-looking man with precise symmetrical features and the hushed, disapproving manner of a senior librarian.

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

Adapt and survive. Make do and mend. These were good mottos for a time traveller.

Why do today what you can still do in a quarter of a million years?

The two men -- Fray and Malkin -- were standing near each other. They were not unarmed. They were quite seriously not unarmed. Both men were carrying -- or at least aiming -- what could only be categorised as small artillery pieces: two bulky gas-powered spinguns, so heavy that they had to be strapped to their bodies via thick leather girdles. Malkin was aiming at the angels, more or less.

Sometimes the only workable solution isn't a fair one

As long as we stay together, you don't have to worry about the darkness.

The cards always look different when it's your turn to play them; loaded with subtly different possibilities.