“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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“Then little Gerda said the Lord's Prayer; the cold was so intense that she could see her own breath; it came out of her mouth like smoke. Her breath became thicker and thicker, and took the form of little angels who grew larger and larger as soon as they touched the ground. All had helmets on their heads, and lances and shields in their hands; their numbers increased, and when Gerda had finished her prayer a whole legion stood around her. They trust their lances against the horrible snow-flakes, so that the latter flew into a hundred pieces; and little Gerda went forward safely and cheerfully. The angels stroked her hands and feet, so that she felt the cold less, and she hastened on to the Snow Queen's castle.”
― Hans Christian Andersen, quote from The Snow Queen
“That time of day when the sun hasn’t come up yet, but you can already feel it coming. It’s an elusive warmth, like a subtle promise whispered in your ear and you can go on with your day knowing you’ve been given another chance to get it right.”
― Cassia Leo, quote from Relentless
“Am auzit sau am citit că filoanele de aur au uneori la suprafață un înveliș de cuarț, din care e greu să extragi metalul. Presupun că și inima ta are un asemenea înveliș; înăuntru se află metalul prețios, dar afurisita asta de coajă nu s-a topit de tot...”
― Henryk Sienkiewicz, quote from Without Dogma
“El afecto del comienzo evolucionó en la medida en que maduraban, pero nunca hablaban de eso. Carecían de palabras para describir ese sentimiento y temían que al hacerlo se rompiera como el cristal. Expresar su relación en palabras significaba definirla, ponerle limites, reducirla; si no se mencionaba permanecía libre e incontaminada.”
― Isabel Allende, quote from Forest of the Pygmies
“I've determined the ideal job for me is one where I can write clever essays about my life and my employer will give me enough money not only to live a comfortable existence, but also to buy many, many new pairs of shoes.”
― Jen Lancaster, quote from Bitter Is the New Black: Confessions of a Condescending, Egomaniacal, Self-Centered Smartass, Or, Why You Should Never Carry A Prada Bag to the Unemployment Office
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Blood River: A Journ...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.
