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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

“People lived and died and did strange, pointless things to themselves. So did societies, be they city-sized states or galactic empires encompassing thousands of solar systems. Everything came and went, everything was new and bright with promise once and old and worn out later, and everything left a small, diminishing stain on eternity, a mark that time would eventually erase.”

Alastair Reynolds book House of Suns

Source: House of Suns (2008), Chapter 16 (p. 240)

Time , People

“I had read in the story-cube that the speed of light was a universal limit; that in a thousand years of experimentation—despite any number of false dawns—no one had ever managed to circumvent it. This had made me feel hemmed in and claustrophobic—it was like being told I must never run or skip down the long, dreary corridors of the house, but must walk instead, with my neck straight and my hands held behind my back. I felt affronted, as if the speed of light was a personal assault on my liberty. Why should I not go as fast as I pleased? Why should I not skip and run? But I could no more explain why the speed limit existed than I could explain why two and two did not make five. It was simply the way things were, one of those rules—like the edict not to visit certain parts of the house—that were not to be questioned.”

Alastair Reynolds book House of Suns

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

Housing , Reading , Question , Light

“Some people get it. Most people never will.
But that’s art.”

Alastair Reynolds Zima Blue

Source: Short fiction, Zima Blue and Other Stories (2006), Zima Blue (p. 403)

People , Art

“The old murals came from the heart,” Zima said. “I painted on a huge scale because that was what the subject matter seemed to demand.”

Alastair Reynolds Zima Blue

“It was good work,” I said.
“It was hack work. Huge, loud, demanding, popular, but ultimately soulless. Just because it came from the heart didn’t make it good.”
Zima Blue (p. 395)
Short fiction, Zima Blue and Other Stories (2006)

Painting , Heart

“Loosen up. I need reverence like I need a skateboard.”

Alastair Reynolds book Angels of Ashes

Angels of Ashes (p. 253)
Short fiction, Zima Blue and Other Stories (2006)

“Could be worse, as they say.”

Alastair Reynolds book On the Steel Breeze

“That’s the sum story of human history, isn’t it? Could be worse. As if that’s the very best that we can manage.”
Source: On the Steel Breeze (2013), Chapter 53 (p. 527)

“I had work to be getting on with. I’ve always had work to be getting on with. It’s what the universe was put there for: to give me things to do.”

Alastair Reynolds book On the Steel Breeze

Source: On the Steel Breeze (2013), Chapter 53 (p. 523)

Universe

“Humanity is an assemblage of information-processing entities, and in that regard you have potential.”

Alastair Reynolds book On the Steel Breeze

Source: On the Steel Breeze (2013), Chapter 43 (p. 438)

“I can’t tell you how much happier I’d be meeting a bunch of artificial intelligences if I also happened to have one on my side.”

Alastair Reynolds book On the Steel Breeze

“Can we drop the ‘artificial intelligence’? It’s a bit like me calling you a meat-based processing system.”
Source: On the Steel Breeze (2013), Chapter 29 (p. 312)

Intelligence

“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