Quotes from Alastair Reynolds

For a moment I think we were turned into information, and that in that instant we were linked to every other piece of information ever known; every thought ever thought, or at least ever captured by the light.

Mathematics is a terrible calling. It's as merciless as gravity. It swallows the soul. There's a point near a black hole called the last stable orbit. Once you drop below that radius, no force in the universe can stop you falling all the way in. That's what happened to your mother – she swam too close to theory, fell below the last stable orbit.

Sooner or later everything boils down to trust. You just have to make that leap of faith.

Truly, it was beautiful to watch. Cruel, too - I admitted that. But what was beauty without a little cruelty at its heart?

It was an exceedingly odd thing to see an elephant in a spacesuit.

It's not how far you've come that matters. It's where you've come from.

Half of all the great art and literature in existence went unrecognised during the lifetimes of its creators.

Gravity ruled, and gravity did not take into account circumstances, or the unfairness of things, or listen to eleventh-hour petitions before reluctantly repealing its laws. Gravity crushed

There's such a thing as free will, Tanner. You didn't have to go along with me, unless you want to admit your brain is ruled by your dick. And I didn't get the impression you regretted any of that.

You don't usually think of boredom as something similar to pain. That's because you've only been exposed to it in relatively small doses. You don't know its true colour. The difference between the boredom you know and the boredom I know is like the difference between touching snow and putting your hand in a vat of liquid nitrogen.

Without risk in our lives, we're scarcely better than machines ourselves.

Everyone has their fulcrum, Chiku. You can bend anyone to any cause with the right timing.

Dimly--at first wary that it was merely a dislodged fragment of the dream--she remembered Resurgam. And then, slowly, events returned, not as a tidal wave, or even as as landslide, but as a slow, squelching slippage: a disembowelment of the past.

It was often difficult to tell if things were a hundred years old, or a hundred thousand.

I'd sliced his head off because in that moment I couldn't think of anything simpler or more beautiful to do.

Humanity is an assemblage of information-processing entities, and in that regard you have potential.

It was a wartime story, goodies versus baddies, lots of explosions and shooting. The Germans always shouted 'Aiiieeee!' as they died. Atkins wondered what he would choose, confronted with similar circumstances. 'Aiiieeee!' seemed to him to lack the necessary gravitas and originality, as well as sounding a bit, well, German. But then who knew what might come to mind, in those final moments?

I am Chiku Akinya. I am the daughter of Sunday Akinya; I am the grand-daughter of Eunice Akinya – Senge Dongma, the lion-faced one, mother of us all...

Behold the wedding gun,' the Ordinator said, holding the box aloft.

But it's the greater fate of the Congregation that concerns me more. Our Occupation, and how it will end. I thought it silly of Rackamore to be troubled by such a distant concern, but I find it much harder to dismiss his fears now. What is the point of any deed, good or otherwise, if this little window of civilisation of ours will soon have its end?

I saw immediately what they were: human technology that had become haunted, possessed by quick, gleaming cleverness. I had seen smart machines before then, but nothing with the agility and cunning of true intelligence. I knew instantly that these were a different order of machine. Some alchemy of chaos and complexity had given their minds powers of consciousness and free will.

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".

He was like that child who always wants to join in the others' games, but wants it too badly, so that the other children wonder why they don't already have friends of their own, and end up even less likely to invite them in.

Only trying to make conversation, friend.' 'Don't bother - it's an overrated activity at the best of times.