Quotes from Alastair Reynolds

Then centrifugal gravity took over, and with something close to majesty the skeletal spacecraft descended out of the repair bay as smoothly and elegantly as a falling chandelier.

The human capacity for grief. It just isn't capable of providing an adequate emotional response once the dead exceed a few dozen in number. And it doesn't just level off—it just gives up, resets itself to zero.

It was not that intelligent life was rare, it seemed, but that intelligent life was very, very prone to becoming extinct. Almost as if something was deliberately wiping it out. The wolves were the missing element in the puzzle, the agency responsible for the extinctions. Implacable, infinitely patient machines, they homed in on the signs of intelligence and enacted a terrible, crushing penalty. Hence, a lonely, silent galaxy, patrolled only by watchful machine sentries.

Birth and death frame a life, give it shape. Without that border it just becomes a kind of sprawling mess, a thing with no edge, no definition, no centre.

We're all Poseidon's children, Geoffrey: whether we like it or not." "Poseidon's children," he repeated. "Is that supposed to mean something?" "We came through. That's all. We weathered the absolute worst that history could throw at us, and we thrived. Now it's time to start doing something useful with our lives.

A fastidious neatness had been at work there, like a poltergeist in reverse.

Some people get it. Most people never will. But that's art.

Lack of ambition is for baseline humans.]

Let me explain something about survival. You do not worry about the third or fourth stepping stone until you have successfully traversed the first and second. Anything beyond them is a diversion of energies away from the immediate moment.

Believe me, this will help. When everything seems like it couldn't get any worse, you'll always be able to tell yourself: I did this one brilliant thing, this one brilliant thing that no one else has ever or will ever do. And that makes me special.

I pushed my hand into the open slot of the maker and closed my fingers around the sculpted handle of the energy-pistol. The newly minted weapon had the peculiar heft of something crammed with intricate machinery at abnormal densities.

She longed to touch it, to stroke her fingers through that atmosphere, cleaving white billowing clouds and glittering salty seas, until she felt the hard scabbed crust beneath them.

You've found a way to stay sane, Renfew--even if that means admitting a tiny piece of piano-playing madness into your world. But there's a cost to that sanity, and it isn't moi . the cost is you can't ever allow yourself an instant of hope, because hope is something that will always be crushed, crushed utterly, and in the crushing of hope you will be weakened forever, just as surely as if you'd mainlined some slow-acting poison." ~"Understanding Space & Time

I am not cruel," he said. "Not in the sense you mean. But cruelty is a useful tool if one can only recognise the precise moment when it must be used.

The stability of the Glitter Band depends on social cohesion, Mister Garlin. We don't have standing armies, we don't have a citizen militia. Even the local constabularies constitute a vanishingly small proportion of our population. But this system only functions in the absence of malicious fear-mongering. I have no time for those who disseminate lies and half-truths for their own ends.

The first query had been merely technical; a check to see that the communication beam was still online. Later, the weapon had become more urgent; adopting tones of polite insistence. Now it was getting far less diplomatic, throwing the machine equivalent of a tantrum.

The place is of no concern to them. They've left it to fester. An informational dead zone. The abstraction doesn't penetrate here, by design. The dome rebuffs it. The family craved their privacy, their insularity. My alert was a simple radio frequency trigger, with just enough power to reach beyond the estate. A risk even in that, but one worth taking." "You keep saying them," Dreyfus said. "For a reason," Stasov answered.

Madness, yes . . . but heartfelt madness.

With me being the bookworm I am, it might seem queer that I didn't go to the library sooner than I did. But books were a nice thing in my life, a luxury and a reminder of better times, and I didn't want to start letting nice things back into my world until I thought there was at least a chance of making it through the next couple of days.

Truth is truth, no matter who else believes it.

To Sky, Clown had become something to be understood; something to be dissected and parameterised. Clown, he now recognised, was something like the bubble-drawing the dolphin had made in the water: a projection carved from light rather than sound.

But you will come to regret this, Abigail. This won't be like one of the memories that fritters away into nothing when you come out of that game. This will leave a stain. You'll carry for it for ever, when you could have had a few more years of blissful innocence. Are you sure, now?

This one could turn her back on her own dying father, or watch a blinded man whimper in pain and not give one cold cuss.

We should have brought a torch," he was saying. "We have been to Saturn and back and we didn't bring a torch.