“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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“Her heart kept splitting inside her. Growing and breaking, rended and rendered, reminding her that she was so, so sick of death. All it carried. All it buried.”
― Ryan Graudin, quote from Blood for Blood
“I learned from her that every woman is worried
about her looks, no matter how beautiful she is.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Adventures of a Curious Character
“Minds, like ancient parachutes, function better when open, but, like fists, they strike harder when closed”
― L.E. Modesitt Jr., quote from The Parafaith War
“When you read the account of a murder - or, say, a fiction story based on murder - you usually begin with the murder itself. That's all wrong. The murder begins a long time beforehand. A murder is the culmination of a lot of different circumstances, all converging at a given moment at a given point. People are brought into it from different parts of the globe and for unforeseen reasons. [...] The murder itself is the end of the story. It's Zero Hour.”
He paused.
“It's Zero Hour now.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from Towards Zero
“I think juju was worked on us at our Eleventh Rite. It’s . . . probably broken with marriage.” I looked hard at Luyu. “I think if you force intercourse, you’ll die.” “It is broken with marriage,” Diti said nodding. “My cousin always talks about how only a pure woman attracts a man pure enough to bring pleasure to the marriage bed. She says her husband is the purest man around . . . probably because he was the first who didn’t bring her pain.” “Ugh,” Luyu said, angrily. “We’re tricked into thinking our husbands are gods.”
― Nnedi Okorafor, quote from Who Fears Death
The Parafaith War
Towards Zero
Who Fears Death
The Immigrants
On Heroes and Tombs
Buffering: Unshared...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.
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