“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
Alastair Reynolds
Born place: in Barry, Wales, The United Kingdom
Born date March 13, 1966
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“Let us pray,” said Doña Guadalupe, and they all knelt down. And as they prayed and Lupe saw the eastern sky growing yellow and rose and pink, she felt herself fill with such power, with such a strength and well-being, that she just knew in her bones that life was eternal. Her eyes filled with tears, she felt so close to these women. The whole world sang and danced before her very eyes as the cycle of life continued and the new day came forth in all its wondrous beauty—a gift from God.”
― Victor Villaseñor, quote from Rain of Gold
“If I'd waited until I was well rested to read, I never would have read anything.”
― Will Schwalbe, quote from The End of Your Life Book Club
“Don't take this next undercover assignment. Stay with me instead."
Nick's eyes pierced hers, refusing to let her off that easily. "Tell me why."
"Because... I love you." She exhaled. No take-backs. The words were out there forever.
And it felt great.”
― Julie James, quote from A Lot like Love
“Between these two, where was the real self? It came to her that both Sister Cecilia and then Agnes were as heavily manufactured of gesture and pose as was Father Damien. And within this, what sifting of identity was she? What mote? What nothing?”
― Louise Erdrich, quote from The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse
“Sometimes," he said, summing up the discussion with an aphorism I have never forgotten, "if you find yourself stuck in politics, the thing to do is start a fight--start a fight, even if you do not know how you are going to win it, because it is only when a fight is on, and everything is in motion, that you can hope to see your way through.”
― Robert Harris, quote from Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome
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LiraelBookQuoters 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.
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