Quotes from Alastair Reynolds

only an anxious need to be an hour or two ahead in the story of her life, reflecting with giddy relief on the difficult business that was now behind her.

All I can say for certain is that, beneath the scrambled chaos of my memories, I feel a driving imperative, a sense of some vital task that I must complete, and which has not yet reached cessation. But I could be completely mistaken. Perhaps I was simply a tourist, ambling his way from sight to sight with no greater goal than to accumulate memories and experience - much like yourselves, in fact.

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, and near the surface of a neutron star gravity crushed absolutely, until diamond flowed like water; until a mountain collapsed into a millionth of its height.

I knew that the swallower was just a little knot of matter, squashed so tight that even its own light couldn't break free of it, and I knew it didn't have a mind or a will or anything you could think of as an appetite.

Another kind of wind, raging out of the Old Sun all the while, but it slips through the hull and the photon sails like they aren't there at all. Dark-wind, some call it. Or ghost-wind or shadow-wind.

I was on a moon in one of them. Earth's, I think. And I kept on trying to get inside this alien structure. Fucking thing kept killing me, but I'd always keep going back inside, like I was being brought back to life each time just for that.

Better to live in the ruins of empire, I thought, and stand a hope of being remembered, than to be lost in those golden multitudes.

All I know is that I think, and therefore I'm exceedingly angry.

Rise to the occasion. Roar like a lion.

My people are impressing on Tulwar's people the wisdom of surrender and a rapid shift of allegiance. I'm counting on most them being opportunist thugs who'll recognize a good thing when it's offered to them.

Behold, Mr. Clavain: Chasm City. A place I have to come to know and, while not actually love, perhaps not to detest with quite the same missionary zeal as when I first arrived.

It is far, far better to close off a possibility, for ever, than to cling to some silly hope.

That didn't take long," Trysil said, clenching a fist so that the muscles popped out along her arm. "You know the captain. When he wants to leave, we leave.

There was a moment of absolute cosmic cold, as if a billion tiny doors had opened in every cell of his body, letting in the draught of creation.

Sufficient determination will conquer any natural reluctance.

Elephants have a theory of mind—they can think into the head of another elephant and infer their knowledge of the world, including errors and omissions of knowledge. That puts them above all but a handful of species—a few primates, some very smart birds and cetaceans.

Volyova did not like planets at the best of times, and gas giants struck her as an unreasonable affront to human scale and frailty. In that respect, they were almost as bad as stars.

All I knew was the way that colour spoke to me, as if I'd been waiting my whole life to find it, to set it free." He thought for a moment. "There's always been something about blue. A thousand years ago Yves Klein said it was the essence of colour itself: the colour that stood for all other colours.

We crawl out of rocks, set our calendars, make a civilisation, scrabble around for quoins, build our proud little empires, and then one day someone puts too many quoins in the same place and it all comes crashing down.

She hesitated, aware that an ill-judged phrase might anger Triumvir Hegazi; not that she particularly cared. Dared she call it the Melding Plague, now that the Yellowstoners had given it a name? Perhaps that would be unwise.

at best noise, at worse a potentially damaging input.

The flare-watch in East Nekhebet had picked up an energy pulse, much brighter than anything seen previously. Briefly, there was the worrying possibility that Delta Pavonis was about to repeat the flare which had wiped out the Amarantin: the vast coronal mass ejection known as the Event. But closer examination revealed that the flare did not originate from the star, but rather from something several light-hours beyond it, on the edge of the system.

Sylveste examined his own state of mind and found—it was the last thing he had expected—total calm. But it was like the calm that existed on the metallic hydrogen oceans of the gas giant planets further out from Pavonis—only maintained by crushing pressures from above and below.

And the knowledge that humanity was not alone in the universe would be as relevant to most as the knowledge that protons were built of quarks.