Quotes from Chasm City

Alastair Reynolds ·  694 pages

Rating: (16.3K votes)


“There was something heartbreakingly beautiful about the lights of distant ships, I thought. It was something that touched both on human achievement and the vastness against which those achievements seemed so frail. It was the same thing whether the lights belonged to a caravel battling the swell on a stormy horizon or a diamond-hulled starship which had just sliced its way through interstellar space.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Chasm City


“War was about yawning chasms of inactivity, punctuated by brief, screaming interludes of action. And in those brief, screaming interludes, events happened both quickly and with dreamlike slowness, every instant burned into memory.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Chasm City


“Victory loses its meaning without the memory of what you've vanquished.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Chasm City


“Then they'd be wrong. It's only our deeds that make us evil, Tanner; they're what define us, nothing else, not our intentions or feelings. But what are a few bad deeds compared to a life, especially the kinds of lives we can live now?”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Chasm City


“You don't usually think of boredom as something similar to pain. That's because you've only been exposed to it in relatively small doses. You don’t know its true colour. The difference between the boredom you know and the boredom I know is like the difference between touching snow and putting your hand in a vat of liquid nitrogen.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Chasm City



“The Melding Plague attacked our society at the core. It was not quite a biological virus, not quite a software virus, but a strange and shifting chimera of the two. No pure strain of the plague has ever been isolated, but in its pure form it must resemble a kind of nano-machinery, analogous to the molecular-scale assemblers of our own medichine technology. That it must be of alien origin seems beyond doubt. Equally clear is the fact that nothing we have thrown against the plague has done more than slow it. More often than not, our interventions have only made things worse. The plague adapts to our attacks; it perverts our weapons and turns them against us. Some kind of buried intelligence seems to guide it. We don’t know whether the plague was directed toward humanity—or whether we have just been terribly unlucky.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Chasm City


“To Sky, Clown had become something to be understood; something to be dissected and parameterised. Clown, he now recognised, was something like the bubble-drawing the dolphin had made in the water: a projection carved from light rather than sound.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Chasm City


“There's such a thing as free will, Tanner. You didn't have to go along with me, unless you want to admit your brain is ruled by your dick. And I didn't get the impression you regretted any of that.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Chasm City


About the author

Alastair Reynolds
Born place: in Barry, Wales, The United Kingdom
Born date March 13, 1966
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“In most ways, Mibs, we Beaumonts are just like other people...We get born, and sometime later we die. And in between, we're happy and sad, we feel love and we feel fear, we eat and we sleep and we hurt like everyone else.

—Momma”
― Ingrid Law, quote from Savvy


“Bunu kendimize yapan biziz. BUNU KENDİMİZE YAPAN BİZİZ. Diğer bir deyişle (ki bu lafımı sakın unutma!): İNSANOĞLU ASLINDA KORKTUĞU YARATIĞIN TA KENDİSİDİR.”
― Josh Malerman, quote from Bird Box


“East of the sun and west of the moon.”
― Edith Pattou, quote from East


“About this business of being a gentleman: I paid so heavily for the fourteen years of my gentleman’s education that I feel entitled, now and then, to get some sort of return.”
― Robert Graves, quote from Goodbye to All That


“Hector, if you get yourself killed again, when I take over Hades I’ll give you a really long time-out in Tartarus,”
― Josephine Angelini, quote from Goddess


Interesting books

Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman
(8.5K)
Without Reservations...
by Alice Steinbach
A Collection of Essays
(3.1K)
A Collection of Essa...
by George Orwell
Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta
(1.8K)
Re: Colonised Planet...
by Doris Lessing
City of Bones
(32.6K)
City of Bones
by Michael Connelly
Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity
(9.5K)
Loose Girl: A Memoir...
by Kerry Cohen
Do You Come Here Often?
(1.8K)
Do You Come Here Oft...
by Alexandra Potter

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.