Alastair Reynolds: Trending quotes (page 10)

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“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.”

Alastair Reynolds book On the Steel Breeze

Source: On the Steel Breeze (2013), Chapter 28 (p. 304)

History

“Crime is an adaptive organism. Squeeze one niche and it moves into another.”

Alastair Reynolds book On the Steel Breeze

Source: On the Steel Breeze (2013), Chapter 26 (p. 283)

“Autocratic governments are masters of self-contradiction. They say one thing, do another.”

Alastair Reynolds book On the Steel Breeze

Source: On the Steel Breeze (2013), Chapter 22 (p. 253)

“Something that bad, it makes the headlines. They were idiots to bet against physics.”

Alastair Reynolds book On the Steel Breeze

Source: On the Steel Breeze (2013), Chapter (p. 149)

“Venus was a machine for making bad weather.”

Alastair Reynolds book On the Steel Breeze

Source: On the Steel Breeze (2013), Chapter 12 (p. 135)

Weather

“I ran an experiment and I got a result. That’s more useful to us than fifty years of theorising.”

Alastair Reynolds book On the Steel Breeze

Source: On the Steel Breeze (2013), Chapter 6 (p. 71)

“I’ll argue to the death against stupid legislation, but some rules exist for a reason.”

Alastair Reynolds book On the Steel Breeze

Source: On the Steel Breeze (2013), Chapter 5 (p. 43)

Stupidity , Death

“We have been clever, and on occasion we have been foolish. For smart monkeys, we can, when the mood takes us, be exceedingly stupid. But it was cleverness that brought us to this point, and it is only cleverness that will serve us from now on.
We have no time for anything else.”

Alastair Reynolds book Blue Remembered Earth

Source: Blue Remembered Earth (2012), Epilogue (p. 562; closing words)

Time , Stupidity , Mood

“You’ll have to excuse our customs and immigration staff: they preach courtesy and respect while demonstrating exactly the opposite.”

Alastair Reynolds book Blue Remembered Earth

Source: Blue Remembered Earth (2012), Chapter 14 (p. 265)

“The boundary between art and kitsch was negotiable, even porous.”

Alastair Reynolds book Blue Remembered Earth

Source: Blue Remembered Earth (2012), Chapter 7 (p. 162)

Art

“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.”

Alastair Reynolds book Blue Remembered Earth

Source: Blue Remembered Earth (2012), Chapter 3 (pp. 65-66)

Intelligence , Life

“Nature shouldn’t be able to do this, Sunday thought. It shouldn’t be able to produce something that resembled the work of directed intelligence, something artful, when the only factors involved were unthinking physics and obscene, spendthrift quantities of time. Time to lay down the sediments, in deluge after deluge, entire epochs in the impossibly distant past when Mars had been both warm and wet, a world deluded into thinking it had a future. Time for cosmic happenstance to hurl a fist from the sky, punching down through these carefully superimposed layers, drilling through these carefully superimposed layers, drilling the geological chapters like a bullet through a book. And then yesterday more time—countless millions of years—for wind and dust to work their callous handiwork, scouring and abrading, wearing the exposed layers back at subtly different rates depending on hardness and chemistry, util these deliberate-looking right-angled steps and contours began to assume grand and imperial solidity, rising from the depths like the stairways of the gods.
Awe-inspiring, yesterday. 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 was she, ultimately, but the end product of physics and matter? And what was her art but the product of physics and matter working on itself?”

Alastair Reynolds book Blue Remembered Earth

Source: Blue Remembered Earth (2012), Chapter 17 (pp. 292-293)

Dependency , God , Books , World

“I worry that it’s me they’re really after.”

Alastair Reynolds book Blue Remembered Earth

“You don’t exist. At the risk of wounding your ego, not everyone in the known universe is obsessed with you and your secret history.”
Source: Blue Remembered Earth (2012), Chapter 14 (p. 260)

“In its purest distillation beauty had always been merciless.”

Alastair Reynolds

Plague Music (p. 294)
Short fiction, Belladonna Nights and Other Stories (2021)

Beauty

“Imagine a permanent, shivering gloom, and never a moment without hunger, thirst and exhaustion. Imagine the constant fear of suffering illness or injury.”

Alastair Reynolds

“You’ve just described nine-tenths of human history.”
Open and Shut (p. 265)
Short fiction, Belladonna Nights and Other Stories (2021)

Hunger , Imagination , Suffering , Fear

“All of it is physics, though, whether you are studying starlings or quarks.”

Alastair Reynolds

A Murmuration (p. 238)
Short fiction, Belladonna Nights and Other Stories (2021)

Study

“There’s nothing like a stupid, accidental death to remind you of the supreme futility of everything.”

Alastair Reynolds

Death’s Door (p. 229)
Short fiction, Belladonna Nights and Other Stories (2021)

Stupidity , Death

“You owned the world when you were a young man, felt it like it was fashioned to fit your hands. You could do anything with it you wanted to. But the world kept changing, and sooner or later there came a day when it didn’t feel like you were the one the world was interested in any more.”

Alastair Reynolds book Wrecking Party

Wrecking Party (p. 178)
Short fiction, Belladonna Nights and Other Stories (2021)

World , Fashion , Change , Feeling