Quotes from Alastair Reynolds

Soon there would be a final morning, a final afternoon, a final sunrise. She measured her life by these thoughts and then reprimanded herself for not simply enjoying such pleasures while she still could.

Sluka shook her head. "We're talking about them in the past tense, and we never even discussed them in the present. It's like their only reason for existing was so they could die.

We don't own them, and we don't have any claims on moral superiority. But after all we've done to them in the past we do have an obligation to shepherd them through to better times.' He

Somewhere out beyond the Empty there now shone stars that had been born in gas clouds after this room was decorated. There were stars that had been alive then that were just corpses now, if they had left the least trace of themselves. There was just too much past, too much time that had already happened, and our lives were as nothing against that endless black conveyor belt, ceaselessly rolling, stretching and stretching ever further backward into a dread eternity.

Life is not calculus, you cold-hearted… algorithm." "Life might not be," I said, steeling myself against his enmity. "But in medicine we use our energies to help those we can, not those we cannot.

Surely you can hear him now?

There was another intelligence out there, close enough to touch. And even if they were now gone, then the mere existence of their handiwork was wonder enough to fundamentally change humanity's view of the universe.

It was one of the oldest tricks of mob-management: give them a hate figure. The

Watch out for pickpockets and gropers now," Adrana said, as if my words counted for nothing. "We'll go all the way along, then come out at Cat Gate.

I don't think the Rattlers are coming back," I said, remembering the bar in the Hall of History. The Rattlers had come and gone during the Fourth Occupation, about nine million years ago, and nothing had been heard of them since.

Weyl curvature tensor . . . but consciousness was no

He had a contract, and he was confident in the capabilities of his vessel.

We've managed to do without intelligent machines until now, Skade. Not because we fear them but because we know that any intelligent entity must choose its own destiny. Yet that servitor doesn't have any free will, does it? Just intelligence. The one without the other is a travesty. We've gone to war over less.]

Might you show me how to project a schematic of the entire inner solar system? I appear to be unable to zoom out from the immediate neighbourhood of Paladin." "Access that sub-menu, then select the logarithmic scale factor," Nissa said. "Thank you—I should have seen that." The

Involvement doesn't necessarily mean willing involvement

Some promises are best broken. Trust me on this: I'm a politician.

His delicate, pale hands reminded Dreyfus of the imprint of a bird's wings in ancient rock.

the incantations which could shatter a mind into ones and zeros; pure number.

Qafzeh's algorithms—if implemented properly on a particular architecture of quantum computer—led to a net heat loss from the local universe. A cryo-arithmetic engine was in essence just a computer, running computational cycles. Unlike ordinary computers, however, it got colder the faster it ran.

There was something heartbreakingly beautiful about the lights of distant ships, I thought. It was something that touched both on human achievement and the vastness against which those achievements seemed so frail.

It was better to live; better to carry a memory of a memory, than suffer the vast burden of knowing. He was not meant to think like a god.

our deeds have no higher meaning than the context of the moment in which they occur.

We're still fumbling in the dark, trying to find out how to live on a galactic scale.

Still, it was vision, or at least vision's idiot cousin.