Quotes from Alastair Reynolds

Nothing worthwhile's ever easy

Paladin swivelled around. "Disturbance detected," it kept saying. "Disturbance detected." Father started rolling up his sleeves. "I suppose I'd better …" he was saying, making a show of letting everyone know he was at least considering getting involved, even though he was happier behind a desk than wrestling with drunks.

So she talked, and Noah, to his credit, did not quibble. He interrupted once or twice, but only for the sake of amplification or clarification, never because he doubted the essential veracity of her story. She told him all of it, from the pod, to the aircraft, to Eunice and the Tantors. She told him what she had learned of Eunice's nature, and why she had no reason to doubt that she had been talking to a machine. She told him of Eunice's amnesia, and the thing called Arachne.

Sometimes it was entirely right and proper to be awed. And recognising the physics in these formations, the hand of time and matter and the nuclear forces underpinning all things, did not lessen that feeling. What

She would worry, just as you worry. It's the people who don't worry—those who never have any doubts that what they're doing is good and right—they're the ones that cause the problems.

Probably fake anyway," Adrana said, with a knowing sniff, as if she had plenty of experience in this area. "C'mon. Don't want to dawdle, not when there's so much to see. The next one's a Limb Broker.

Get off the throne, Mr. Quindar. And you," Madame Granity said, pointing to me, "you get on it. I know your sister's got the gift, and it often runs in siblings, however I'd still like to see it for myself.

What you encountered was an abomination, a military intelligence. It was designed to be insidious and spiteful and inimical to life, and it wasn't smart enough to have a conscience.

That she had loved Sylveste because he was such a self-important bastard and made something noble of being a self-important bastard, did it with such utter aplomb that it became a kind of virtue, like the wearing of sackcloth

Perhaps there was some loop or circuit missing from the brains of people like Garlin, some absent process that prevented them from seeing themselves from outside their own skin, in all their ludicrousness. But to a degree, Sparver reflected, it must also be absent from those they swept up into their movements.

When two or more of their lighthuggers met, they would compare and update their respective nomenclature tables. If the first ship had assigned names to a group of worlds and their associated geographical features, and the second ship had no current entries for those bodies, it was usual for the second ship to amend its database with the new names. They might be flagged as provisional, unless a third ship confirmed that they were still unallocated.

Keep trying,' Merlin said. 'Keep making mistakes, and learning from them. That's all any culture ever does.

There was no present, no past, no future. No sadness, no sorrow, because those were ordinary little human emotions that required a frame of reference, and she had none to cling to. She had caved in, become a measureless void, no poles, no lines of latitude or longitude. She was an emptiness bigger than galaxies, unmapped and unmappable.

I take each day as it comes. I'd rather take good memories from one world than fret about the thousand I'll never see.

Her situational training emphasised immediate practicalities: what it took to remain alive for the next minute, and the minute after that, rather than concerning herself with ten minutes or an hour from now. It was hard-won pragmatism, distilled from hundreds of real-world scenarios faced by earlier generations of prefects. The lesson was that it worked—most of the time.

This is how attrition happens, I thought to myself. You take one chance too many, imagining that all the previous instances of good fortune have somehow immunised you against hazard, when in fact you have simply been extraordinarily fortunate until now.

But one of the truly delightful things about science fiction is that it is far less about new ideas than it is about finding new ways to think about old ones.

talked into a stupid investment in exactly the thing he disapproved of. He was like that: easily persuaded against his

You always do, Mister Ness, and it's to your credit. As are your daughters. Fine specimens, both. It's been my pleasure and my privilege to have seen them through their development." He carried on with the humming, and started digging his short, fat fingers into his pocket. "Would you like a …

If it took a monster to do that, doesn't that mean we sometimes need monsters?' 'Maybe we do. But that doesn't mean we should forgive them for what they are, even for an instant.

well. Like all worlds, it had felt as wide as the universe when I was standing on it, but now I saw it for the little silver pebble it really was - a small round rock floating in an infinitely larger void, barriered from vacuum by the thinnest gasp of an atmosphere

I can have Paladin take you home," Father said in a warning tone.

When you recall something - this conversation, perhaps, a hundred years from now - there will be things about it that you misremember. Yet those misremembered details will themselves become part of your memory, gaining solidity and texture with each instance of recall. A thousand years from now, your memory of this conversation might bear little resemblance to reality. Yet you'd swear your recollection was accurate.

make a good showing among all the monied bigwigs in the Mazarile chamber of commerce, he'd brought both of us along for the evening. We were meant to be on our best behaviour. Prim and proper educated young ladies.