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Alastair Reynolds
259 quotes
“The boundary between art and kitsch was negotiable, even porous.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How did you…pass the time?” Sunday asked. “You couldn’t just ching out of it, could you?” “We had a different form of chinging,” Eunice said. “An earlier type of virtual-reality technology, much more robust and completely unaffected by time lag. You may have heard of it. We called it ‘reading.’”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I worry that it’s me they’re really after.” “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.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You’ll have to excuse our customs and immigration staff: they preach courtesy and respect while demonstrating exactly the opposite.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She worked quickly, but not because she considered the commission beneath her. It was simply the way she always approached her art. Preparation, forethought, hours of meditation, then an explosion of swift and decisive action, like the quick and merciful descent of a sword. Execution, in every sense of the word.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They had hardly ever spoken of her life before the the day they met in Belém. It was what they had both agreed on, a relationship built on a solid foundation of mutual ignorance.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’ll argue to the death against stupid legislation, but some rules exist for a reason.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I ran an experiment and I got a result. That’s more useful to us than fifty years of theorising.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Venus was a machine for making bad weather.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Something that bad, it makes the headlines. They were idiots to bet against physics.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Autocratic governments are masters of self-contradiction. They say one thing, do another.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense.” “Welcome to politics.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Crime is an adaptive organism. Squeeze one niche and it moves into another.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.” “Can we drop the ‘artificial intelligence’? It’s a bit like me calling you a meat-based processing system.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Humanity is an assemblage of information-processing entities, and in that regard you have potential.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All her concerns, all her fears, began to feel trifling. It was just a trick of perspective, really, seeing things as they truly were.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Could be worse, as they say.” “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.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I can’t stop being a rationalist just because it upsets some people.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You weren’t there.” “I didn’t have to be—I know my history.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Half of all the great art and literature in existence went unrecognised during the lifetimes of its creators.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was a fault of the human condition—or perhaps a blessing—that there was no situation which did not eventually become the normal state of affairs.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Kanu closed his eyes, opened them again, hoping that the world would have done the decent thing and changed into a less problematic version of itself.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are no nasty surprises,” Swift said, “only degrees of unpreparedness.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ideology is all there is.” “Really? I would have thought there were many other human qualities worth considering. Fairness. Generosity. A sense of humour. A willingness to see the best in people, even those we do not automatically agree with.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“History’s a stopped clock,” Eunice said. “It’s nice to look at, but there’s only so much you can tell you.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I will say this, though—it’s a very odd thing not to be conscious. To be—to all intents and purposes—dead. Neither gathering nor generating information, as cold and changeless as eternity. How do you humans live with the thought of that hanging over every moment of your pitifully short existences?” “We don’t,” Kanu said. “We just get on with it.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’m not on the side of elephants or people, Goma. I’m on the side against stupidity.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Clearly we missed something.” “You have a fine talent for understatement.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Of course there were no miracles to be had, except of the modest kind permitted by the exigencies of medicine and time.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Are you impressed?” Goma dared ask. “I don’t really do impressed. But consider yourselves the recipients of grudging approval.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Goma shook her head. “No. We don’t speak of souls. Not now, not ever. Souls aren’t real.” “Patterns, then. Abstract structures of experience and reaction, making up a consistent, continuous human identity.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We have all made mistakes. The mark of intelligence is to learn from them, and not be bound by the errors of the past.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If I’ve learned one thing in my long existence, it’s that hesitation gets you nowhere.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And when do we abandon negotiation and start hitting each other with increasingly large sticks?” Ru said. “Only when we’ve exhausted all the other options,” Vasin said.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The sense of squandered possibility, of better paths now lost to them all, filled him with a sudden rising sadness. He wondered if it was too late to make something better of their world.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You’re taking this very well,” Goma said. Eunice gave a semi-shrug. “Experience. You can fight the odds up to a point, but sooner or later you have to face reality. The universe doesn’t care about temper tantrums or pity.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’d argue with you, but I suspect it would feel a bit like arguing with myself.” “Futile?” “Boring.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Oh, I’m not perfect—not by a long stretch. I just make the rest of you look bad.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now you’re scaring me.” “If you were not scared, you don’t understand the situation.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Believe me, Kanu—the one thing you don’t do in emergencies is think things through. Thinking things through gets you a headstone and a nice epitaph. She thought things through. See how that worked out for her.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You wish things were different from the way they are. That’s a refrain as old as time. I’ve lived a long and strange sort of life, Kanu, and I’ve known that feeling a few times. Generally it’s best to accept that things are exactly as bad as they look. At least that way you know it’s time to start digging your way out.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For all you know, no one even remembers what you did by now.” “No one remembers anything, in the end.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Khouri did not need to be told that Hades was a neutron star, any more than she needed to be told that there was no such thing as a safe close encounter with one. You either kept away or you died; those were the rules, and there was no force in the universe capable of negating them. Gravity ruled, and gravity did not take into account circumstances, or the unfairness of things, or listen to eleventh-hour petitions before reluctantly repealing its laws. Gravity crushed, and near the surface of a neutron star gravity crushed absolutely, until diamond flowed like water; until a mountain collapsed into a millionth of its height.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I learnt the true meaning of what was euphemistically described as close-quarters combat. No line-of-sight particle-beam weapons now; no delayed-detonation nano-munitions. What close-quarters combat meant was something which would have been infinitely more recognisable to a soldier of a thousand years earlier: the screaming fury of human beings packed so close together that the only effective way to kill each other was with sharpened metal weapons: bayonets and daggers, or with hands around each other’s throats; fingers pressed into each other’s eye-sockets. The only way to survive was to disengage all higher brain-functions and regress to an animal state of mind. So I did. And in doing so, I learned a deeper truth about war. She punished those who flirted with her by making them like herself. Once you opened the door to the animal, there was no shutting it.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Relativity distorted classical expectations in a way that Clavain still did not find entirely intuitive. Slam two objects towards each other, each with individual velocities just below light-speed, and the classical result for their closing velocity would be the sum of their individual speeds: just under twice the speed of light. Yet the true result, confirmed with numbing precision, was that the objects saw each other approach with a combined speed that was still just below the speed of light. Similarly, the relativistic closing velocity for two objects moving towards each other with individual speeds of one-half of light-speed was not light-speed itself, but eight-tenths of it. It was the way the universe was put together, and yet it was not something the human mind had evolved to accept.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The virus was not helping. He had hoped that it would, but the feelings it brought were too superficial. When he most needed their succour he could feel them for the paper-thin façades they were. Just because the virus was tickling the parts of his brain that produced feelings of religious experience didn’t mean he was able to turn off the other parts of his mind that recognised these feelings as having been induced artificially. He truly felt himself to be in the presence of something sacred, but he also knew, with total clarity, that this was due to neuroanatomy. Nothing was really with him: the organ music, the stained-glass windows in the sky, the sense of proximity to something huge and timeless and infinitely compassionate were all explicable in terms of neural wiring, firing potentials, synaptic gaps.”
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source