Alastair Reynolds Quotes

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

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

~ Alastair Reynolds

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

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

Yves Klein said it was the essence of colour itself: the colour that stood for all other colours. A man once spent his entire life searching for a particular shade of blue that he remembered encountering in childhood. He began to despair of ever finding it, thinking he must have imagined that precise shade, that it could not possibly exist in nature. Then one day he chanced upon it. It was the colour of a beetle in a museum of natural history. He wept for joy.’- Zima Blue by Alastair Reynolds

~ Alastair Reynolds

Making love was a game of echoes. We had shared memories so many times that when I made love to her, I knew exactly how it felt to be Purslane. I could taste and feel her other lovers and she could taste and feel mine, each experience reaching away like a reflection in a hall of mirrors, diminishing into a kind of carnal background radiation, a sea of sensuous experience. I had been a girl once, then a thousand men and women and all their lovers. The stasis field locked on. The Synchromesh took hold. I hurtled into my own future, while my ship ate space and time.- House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds

~ Alastair Reynolds

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

~ Alastair Reynolds

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

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

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

~ Alastair Reynolds

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

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

I don't know. That was typical Sajaki; like all the genuinely clever people Sylveste had met he knew better than to feign understanding where none existed.

~ Alastair Reynolds

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

~ Alastair Reynolds

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

~ Alastair Reynolds

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.

~ Alastair Reynolds

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

~ Alastair Reynolds

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

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

~ Alastair Reynolds

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

The cards always look different when it’s your turn to play them, loaded with subtly different possibilities.

~ Alastair Reynolds

No act of knowledge acquisition is entirely without risk.

~ Alastair Reynolds

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

~ Alastair Reynolds

Victory loses its meaning without the memory of what you've vanquished.

~ Alastair Reynolds

Enjoy it, kid. Enjoy feeling that you can make a difference.' Floyd flashed him a smile. 'It won't last for ever.

~ Alastair Reynolds

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. That’s what happened to your mother – she swam too close to theory, fell below the last stable orbit.

~ Alastair Reynolds

We all have it in us to be something other than what we are, I thought, but we don't often get a glimpse of what we could have been

~ Alastair Reynolds

There's such a thing as free will, Tanner. You didn't have to go along with me, unless you want to admit your brain is ruled by your dick. And I didn't get the impression you regretted any of that.

~ Alastair Reynolds

You don't usually think of boredom as something similar to pain. That's because you've only been exposed to it in relatively small doses. You don’t know its true colour. The difference between the boredom you know and the boredom I know is like the difference between touching snow and putting your hand in a vat of liquid nitrogen.

~ Alastair Reynolds

For a moment I think we were turned into information, and that in that instant we were linked to every other piece of information ever known; every thought ever thought, or at least ever captured by the light.

~ Alastair Reynolds

You worry that we're becoming monsters. Merlin, we already were monsters. You didn't make us any worse.

~ Alastair Reynolds

I'm not a morning person: I can't function until I've had a coffee - or several.

~ Alastair Reynolds