Quotes from Alastair Reynolds

She loved sarcasm, especially from engineers.

I live each day as it comes." "It's the only way. Pedro

Being a thing with a central nervous system complex enough to understand the concept of being a thing with a central nervous system. Simply being. Consider all the inanimate

It was that same old spiralling argument, and again he didn't have the energy to fight his corner. 'When you put it like that, I guess it doesn't sound too ridiculous.

A moment later Cruz felt the nerve agent infiltrate her lungs. No one had to tell her it would be fatal.

Chiku felt something very close to vertigo, a dizzy sort of perception that she had only just begun to grasp the vertical depth of a very long life, the sense of how far it plumbed the past. A life that went down like a lift-shaft, each floor containing an ordinary life's worth of love and loss, adventure and disappointment, dreams and ruins, joy and sorrow.

This is a kindness, a thing done to another human being for no reason other than compassion. A private, dignified act of basic human decency, which history, being the bastard that it is, will probably neglect to commemorate. You

Only an evolutionary eyeblink separated Kanu from the savannah, and that was just as true for the Risen. Their minds might be fixed on the stars, but their bodies were only a footstep from the dust and heat of Amboseli.

He knew what he was doing. You probably weren't meant to die." "And that makes me lucky? It wasn't remotely unlucky to end up impaled on a wall in the first place? Just a thought.

I'm always serious about my fun. I

Our fears keep us on our toes.

Life was a very odd thing indeed, he reflected, when you really thought about it.

In less than twelve hours, Purslane's ship would be travelling so close to the speed of light that the fastest ship ever built would still need a hundred thousand years to catch up with her.

Sometimes, at the heart of one of these stellar death-events, she observed a newly forged pulsar, emitting radio bursts with ever-slowing but stately precision, like the clocks in some forgotten imperial palace which had been wound one final time and would now tick until they died, the time between each tick lengthening towards some chill eternity.

Self-defence is an exceedingly elastic concept. Would you be so good as to narrow the parameters?

Banking and Prosperity in the Thirteenth Occupation or even A Child's Treasury of Economics or The Young Person's Illustrated Omnibus of Fiscal Prudence.

So the next time you need a piece of apparently obscure information, try asking a science fiction writer. You might be surprised.

They would continue to live in New Tiamaat, orbiting Crucible.

It was, Sylveste knew, simply the understandable attempt of a culture to raise a mirror to itself. What made it significant was the complete extent to which it had permeated their culture

It was a mansion of ghosts and monsters, with ghouls in the shadows and demons scuttling behind the wainscotting.

What's the point in longevity if every day is a grey duplicate of the one before?

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.

What could be better than being a shatterling? Only one thing, I thought to myself. Being a wicked shatterling. Being a devil instead of an angel. Having all that power, all that wisdom, but being able to do anything with it. Being able to destroy as well as create.

has a control system so perilously close to intelligence that a government agent must be on hand at all times, ready to destroy the machine if it slips over the threshold into consciousness.