Alastair Reynolds Quotes page 3

“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.”

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

Alastair Reynolds book Absolution Gap

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

“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.”

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

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

“Nice girls don’t carry guns.”

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

Alastair Reynolds book Century Rain

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

“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)

“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?”

“How long have we been friends, Dan?”

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).

“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?”

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

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

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)

“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.”

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

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

“Do you think it means anything?”

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

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

“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)

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

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

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

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

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

“I have only your word for that.”

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

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

“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)

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“There’s still 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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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)

“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.”

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