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Alastair Reynolds QUOTES

Alastair Reynolds QUOTES

1 " Cyphel knew exactly how he felt about her as well — it was there in her expression whenever they spoke that beguiling combination of amusement and haughtiness that she carried off so well. It was a look that expressed disdain at Campion’s guarded advances but also a kind of measured probationary respect as well. It was a look that said You dare to think that I will find you as interesting as you obviously find me Well perhaps in that very act of daring you become interesting to me if only fleetingly. "

― Alastair Reynolds

2 " How did you . . . pass the time?’ Sunday asked. ‘You couldn’t just ching out of it, could you?’

‘We had a different form of chinging,’ Eunice said. ‘An earlier type of virtual-reality technology, much more robust and completely unaffected by time lag. You may have heard of it. We called it “reading”. "

― Alastair Reynolds , Blue Remembered Earth (Poseidon's Children, #1)

3 " A city's only ever three hot meals away from anarchy. "

― Alastair Reynolds , Terminal World

4 " History is what we write, not what we remember. Why should we tarnish the memory of our planet by enshrining our less then noble deeds? "

― Alastair Reynolds , Thousandth Night / Minla's Flowers

5 " Consider all the inanimate matter in the universe, all the dumb atoms, all the mindless molecules, all the oblivious dust grains and pebbles and rocks and iceballs and worlds and stars, all the unthinking galaxies and superclusters, wheeling through the oblivious time-haunted megaparsecs of the cosmic supervoid.
In all that immensity, she had somehow contrived to BE a human being, a microscopically tiny, cosmically insignificant bundle of information-processing systems, wired to a mind more structurally complex than the Milky Way itself, maybe even more complex than the rest of the *whole damned universe*! "

― Alastair Reynolds , Blue Remembered Earth (Poseidon's Children, #1)

6 " Half of all the great art and literature in existence went unrecognised during the lifetimes of its creators. "

― Alastair Reynolds , Poseidon's Wake (Poseidon's Children, #3)

7 " 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. Admit it. None of us feel a damn about these people. "

― Alastair Reynolds , Revelation Space (Revelation Space, #1)

8 " Dimly--at first wary that it was merely a dislodged fragment of the dream--she remembered Resurgam. And then, slowly, events returned, not as a tidal wave, or even as as landslide, but as a slow, squelching slippage: a disembowelment of the past. "

― Alastair Reynolds , Revelation Space (Revelation Space, #1)

9 " It’s not how far you’ve come that matters. It’s where you’ve come from. "

― Alastair Reynolds , Poseidon's Wake (Poseidon's Children, #3)

10 " To see something marvellous with your own eyes - that’s wonderful enough. But when two of you see it, two of you together, holding hands, holding each other close, knowing that you’ll both have that memory for the rest of your lives, but that each of you will only ever hold an incomplete half of it, and that it won’t ever really exist as a whole until you’re together, talking or thinking about that moment ... that’s worth more than one plus one. It’s worth four, or eight, or some number so large we can’t even imagine it. "

― Alastair Reynolds , House of Suns

11 " 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 the same thing whether the lights belonged to a caravel battling the swell on a stormy horizon or a diamond-hulled starship which had just sliced its way through interstellar space. "

― Alastair Reynolds , Chasm City

12 " It's called optimism — but I’m losing the hang of it fast. "

― Alastair Reynolds , Revelation Space (Revelation Space, #1)

13 " It is always better to try and fail than not to try. "

― Alastair Reynolds , Pushing Ice

14 " Still, it was vision, or at least vision’s idiot cousin. "

― Alastair Reynolds , Revelation Space (Revelation Space, #1)

15 " 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? "

― Alastair Reynolds

16 " At one time, the treatment for a certain kind of psychosis had been to push an ice pick up through the orbit of the eye, into the frontal lobe; the ice pick was then stirred around until it reduced the problematic brain tissue to non-functioning porridge. "

― Alastair Reynolds , Terminal World

17 " Nothing had ever existed between us except the possibility of something, and now even that was over. "

― Alastair Reynolds , House of Suns

18 " 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 "

― Alastair Reynolds , Revelation Space (Revelation Space, #1)

19 " No act of knowledge acquisition is entirely without risk. "

― Alastair Reynolds , House of Suns

20 " Without risk in our lives, we’re scarcely better than machines ourselves. "

― Alastair Reynolds , On the Steel Breeze (Poseidon's Children, #2)