Alastair Reynolds: Trending quotes (page 8)

“They might have their airships and machine guns, but superstition wasn’t something that went away just because you had engines and bullets.”

Alastair Reynolds book Terminal World

Source: Terminal World (2010), Chapter 11 (p. 177)

“I have only your word for that.”

Alastair Reynolds book House of Suns

“Yes,” the glass man said, “that’s rather the point. There’s going to have to be a lot more trust from this time forward. Why don’t we start as we mean to go on?”

Chapter 41 (p. 563)
House of Suns (2008)

“Do you see us slavering for revenge, that most pointlessly biological of imperatives?”

Alastair Reynolds book House of Suns

Source: House of Suns (2008), Chapter 41 (p. 558)

Revenge

“We were sowing so much misinformation that some of it came back and bit us.”

Alastair Reynolds book House of Suns

Source: House of Suns (2008), Chapter 39 (pp. 516-517)

“Don’t you start. It’s bad enough that one of us feels he could have done more. We’re human, Campion—that’s all it boils down to. Human and not nearly as clever as we thought we were when it counted. End of story. When they put up the gravestone for our species, that’ll be the epitaph.”

Alastair Reynolds book House of Suns

Source: House of Suns (2008), Chapter 39 (p. 509)

Bad luck , Feeling

“Given the evidence at our disposal, only a fool would put any faith in the organic and the machine living harmoniously for the rest of time.”

Alastair Reynolds book House of Suns

Source: House of Suns (2008), Chapter 38 (pp. 501-502)

Faith , Time , Fools

“They’re your children. The more you try to force them to be like you, the more they’re going to flare off in different directions like wild fireworks, the more they’re going to surprise and disappoint you.”

Alastair Reynolds book House of Suns

Introduction to Part 8 (pp. 485-486)
House of Suns (2008)

Disappointment , Children

“There had been a human soul in that skull only a few hours earlier, and now no authority in the universe could bring her back. We were like monkeys sitting around a fire that had just extinguished, wondering why the warmth and light had gone away.”

Alastair Reynolds book House of Suns

Source: House of Suns (2008), Chapter 19 (pp. 307-308)

Light , Soul , Universe

“I felt a terrible sadness open inside me, a void through which the winds from the end of the universe were blowing.”

Alastair Reynolds book House of Suns

Source: House of Suns (2008), Chapter 19 (p. 307)

Universe , Sadness

“Civilisations beyond number had risen from obscurity, considering themselves masters of all creation, before fading back into the footnotes of history.”

Alastair Reynolds book House of Suns

Source: House of Suns (2008), Chapter 12 (p. 152)

History

“The problem was, although I was as certain as I could be that I was right, I could offer nothing to bolster my arguments.”

Alastair Reynolds book House of Suns

Introduction to Part 2 (p. 100)
House of Suns (2008)

Problem

“No act of knowledge acquisition is entirely without risk.”

Alastair Reynolds book House of Suns

Source: House of Suns (2008), Chapter 5 (p. 59)

Knowledge

“I was born in a house with a million rooms, built on a small, airless world on the edge of an empire of light and commerce that the adults called the Golden Hour, for a reason I did not yet grasp.”

Alastair Reynolds book House of Suns

Source: House of Suns (2008), Chapter 1 (p. 3; opening words)

Light , World , Housing

“I wish there was something we could do. But organised structure is the most precious thing in the universe. When it is lost, it is truly lost.”

Alastair Reynolds book Pushing Ice

Source: Pushing Ice (2005), Chapter 39 (p. 557)

Universe

“There’s still hope.”

Alastair Reynolds book Pushing Ice

But a small, private voice said: there’s hope, and there’s desperation.

Chapter 38 (p. 527)
Pushing Ice (2005)

Hope

“That was the universe: you could beat it once, you could float a message in a bottle across half of eternity, but the universe would always find a way to have the last laugh.”

Alastair Reynolds book Pushing Ice

Source: Pushing Ice (2005), Chapter 36 (p. 492)

Way , Universe

“Some promises are best broken. Trust me on this: I’m a politician.”

Alastair Reynolds book Pushing Ice

Source: Pushing Ice (2005), Chapter 34 (p. 475)

“The existence theorem says that it is always much easier to find a solution when you can be confident that one exists.”

Alastair Reynolds book Pushing Ice

Source: Pushing Ice (2005), Chapter 31 (p. 444)

Self-confidence , Confidence

“There are certain truths that, in themselves, are as dangerous as any advanced technology.”

Alastair Reynolds book Pushing Ice

Source: Pushing Ice (2005), Chapter 30 (p. 435)

Truth

“Hallucination doesn’t preclude a rational response to that same hallucination.”

Alastair Reynolds book Pushing Ice

Source: Pushing Ice (2005), Chapter 19 (p. 319)