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Alastair Reynolds Quotes
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Alastair Preston Reynolds is a British science fiction author. He specialises in hard science fiction and space opera. He spent his early years in Cornwall, moved back to Wales before going to Newcastle University, where he read physics and astronomy. Afterwards, he earned a PhD in astrophysics from the University of St Andrews. In 1991, he moved to Noordwijk in the Netherlands where he met his wife Josette . There, he worked for the European Space Research and Technology Centre until 2004 when he left to pursue writing full-time. He returned to Wales in 2008 and lives near Cardiff. Wikipedia  

✵ 13. March 1966
Alastair Reynolds photo
Alastair Reynolds: 198   quotes 2   likes

Alastair Reynolds Quotes

““It must be a real one-horse town.”
Auger shook her head as she lit a cigarette. “It has wild ambitions of becoming a one-horse town.””

Alastair Reynolds book Century Rain

Source: Century Rain (2004), Chapter 15 (p. 242)

Horse

“It was his experience that crises in space fell into two categories: those that killed you immediately, usually without much warning, and those that gave you plenty of time to ruminate on the problem, even if no solution was very likely.”

Alastair Reynolds book Redemption Ark

Source: Redemption Ark (2002), Chapter 15 (p. 265)

Problem , Time

“The new regime which had succeeded his after the coup had become as fragmentary as the old, in the time-honoured way of all revolutions.”

Alastair Reynolds book Revelation Space

Source: Revelation Space (2000), Chapter 3 (p. 61).

Way , Time

“To feel oneself so tiny, so fragile, so inherently losable, was at first spiritually crushing. But, by the same token, this realisation was also strangely liberating: if an individual human existence meant so little, if one’s actions were so cosmically irrelevant, then the notion of some absolute moral framework made about as much sense as the universal ether. Measured against the infinite, therefore, people were no more capable of meaningful sin—or meaningful good—than ants, or dust.
Worlds barely registered sin. Suns hardly deigned to notice it. On the scale of solar systems and galaxies, it meant nothing at all. It was like some obscure subatomic force that simply petered out on those scales.”

Alastair Reynolds book Absolution Gap

Source: Absolution Gap (2003), Chapter 6 (p. 84)

People , World , Feeling , Sense

“She wondered if she could put a dart in his eye. It would not kill him, but it might take the edge off his cockiness.”

Alastair Reynolds book Revelation Space

Source: Revelation Space (2000), Chapter 2 (p. 59).

“It seemed that she had not so much misjudged the woman as assigned her to completely the wrong species.”

Alastair Reynolds book Revelation Space

Source: Revelation Space (2000), Chapter 14 (p. 316).

“Nice girls don’t carry guns.”

Alastair Reynolds book Century Rain

Source: Century Rain (2004), Chapter 19 (p. 325)

Girl

“Can I still wish you good luck?”

Alastair Reynolds book Redemption Ark

“You can wish me what the hell you like. It won’t make any difference. If it did, it would mean I hadn’t prepared well enough.

Chapter 38 (p. 654)
Redemption Ark (2002)

Bad luck

“How are the internal complications, anyway? Aren’t the other branches of government getting a little suspicious about all these machinations?”

Alastair Reynolds book Redemption Ark

“Let’s just say that one or two discreet assassinations may still have to be performed,” Khouri said.
Source: Redemption Ark (2002), Chapter 27 (p. 490)

“That’s how it went, wasn’t it Zebra?”

Alastair Reynolds book Chasm City

“It might,” she said. “If I happened to be colluding in your own delusions.”
Source: Chasm City (2001), Chapter 29 (p. 479).

“Haven’t you ever heard of morale-building?”

Alastair Reynolds book Revelation Space

Khouri had asked.
“Heard of it,” Volyova said. “Don’t happen to agree with it. Would you rather be happy and dead, or scared and alive?”
Source: Revelation Space (2000), Chapter 19 (p. 381).

“How long have we been friends, Dan?”

Alastair Reynolds book Revelation Space

“I wouldn’t exactly call it friendship; more a kind of mutual parasitism.”

Chapter 7 (p. 166).
Revelation Space (2000)

“All right, Marius—I get the message. In fact I intercepted it, parsed it, filtered it, decrypted it with the appropriate onetime pad and wrote a fucking two-hundred-page report on it. Satisfied?”

Alastair Reynolds

“I’m never satisfied, Mishenka. It just isn’t in my nature.”
A Spy in Europa (pp. 104-105)
Short fiction, Galactic North (2006)

“Tell me, scientist to scientist, do you honestly think it will work?”

Alastair Reynolds book Diamond Dogs

“We won’t know until we try,” Naqi said. Any other answer would have been politically hazardous: too much optimism and the politicians would have started asking just why the expensive project was needed in the first place. Too much pessimism and they would ask exactly the same question.

Turquoise Days, Chapter 2 (pp. 240-241)
Short fiction, Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days (2003)

Thinking

“It was easy to sound that confident; less easy to believe it in his heart. They had got this far did not give them an automatic guarantee of success. The world did not work like that. It took pleasure in punishing the cocksure.”

Alastair Reynolds book Terminal World

Source: Terminal World (2010), Chapter 24 (p. 455)

Confidence , Success , Heart , Pleasure

“Hopefully they’ll accept me for what I am, not what I was. That’s all we can ever hope for, isn’t it?”

Alastair Reynolds book Terminal World

Source: Terminal World (2010), Chapter 24 (p. 454)

Hope

“Do you think it means anything?”

Alastair Reynolds book Terminal World

“Probably not," Ricasso said, wiping his dust-smeared hands on his knees. “I’m all for looking for meaning in ancient texts. But now and then you have to just accept the fact that you’re dealing with so much religious gibberish.”

Chapter 22 (p. 413)
Terminal World (2010)

Thinking

“This was a watering hole, and watering holes drew the hungry as well as the parched.”

Alastair Reynolds book Terminal World

Source: Terminal World (2010), Chapter 16 (p. 265)

Water

“And you do not think that this is possible?”

Alastair Reynolds book Terminal World

“I’ll believe in anything when I see evidence for it.”

Chapter 12 (p. 188)
Terminal World (2010)

Depressing , Sad , Faith , Hope

“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)

“Even godlike aliens have to act rationally—don’t they?”

Alastair Reynolds book Pushing Ice

“I wouldn’t know,” she said. “I can’t recall ever meeting any.”

Chapter 18 (p. 301)
Pushing Ice (2005)

“It’s always easier to hate than to forgive, isn’t it?”

Alastair Reynolds book Pushing Ice

Source: Pushing Ice (2005), Chapter 14 (p. 233)

Forgiveness , Hate

“Such hopes now seemed ludicrous in their naivety, like trying to stop a bulldozer with a feather.”

Alastair Reynolds book Pushing Ice

Source: Pushing Ice (2005), Chapter 13 (p. 216)

Hope , Naivety

“There’s a lot here we don’t understand. Adding one more thing to the list doesn’t strike me as the worst crime imaginable.”

Alastair Reynolds book Pushing Ice

Source: Pushing Ice (2005), Chapter 10 (p. 164)

Imagination , Understanding

“It was astonishing how quickly friendship could turn to enmity, she thought, like a compass needle swinging from one pole to the other.
They’d been excellent friends. They’d make excellent enemies as well.”

Alastair Reynolds book Pushing Ice

Source: Pushing Ice (2005), Chapter 8 (p. 132)

Making love , Friendship

“She was pointing into the empty, angel-less heavens beyond.
Everything else. The universe.”

Alastair Reynolds book Terminal World

Source: Terminal World (2010), Chapter 30 (p. 550; closing words)

Universe , Angels

“We don’t have enough evidence to decide either way,” Ricasso said, “so for now we may as well keep open minds.”

Alastair Reynolds book Terminal World

Source: Terminal World (2010), Chapter 22 (p. 405)

Way

“If my years as a shatterling had taught me anything, it was that not all questions had answers. Societies had reduced themselves to radioactive dust because they could not accept that single unpalatable truth.”

Alastair Reynolds book House of Suns

Source: House of Suns (2008), Chapter 8 (pp. 84-85)

Truth , Question

“The question is: do you trust me? Sometimes.”

Alastair Reynolds book Pushing Ice

Bella smiled. “That’s exactly the right attitude: trust your leaders, but be careful not to trust them too much.”
Source: Pushing Ice (2005), Chapter 27 (p. 397)

Question

“I’m not asking you to open your mind to all manner of nonsense, Doctor, merely to allow for the possibility of things you might previously have dismissed, or failed to give any consideration to whatsoever. Such as the fact that the world was not always this way, and by implication doesn’t have to be this way in the future.”

Alastair Reynolds book Terminal World

Source: Terminal World (2010), Chapter 14 (p. 232)

World , Future , Way

“Open your story-cube on the way home and ask it to tell you about causality violation. I did once, because I asked the same question you did. Why should I be limited? What right does the universe have to say what I can and can’t do? I’m intelligent. The universe is just a lot of hydrogen and dirt, going through the motions. But in this instance the universe has the final say.”

Alastair Reynolds book House of Suns

Introduction to Part 4 (p. 267)
House of Suns (2008)

Home , Question , Intelligence , Universe