“It looked like a biology lesson for gods, or a snapshot of the kind of pornography which might be enjoyed by sentient planets.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Revelation Space
“I don't know." That was typical Sajaki; like all the genuinely clever people Sylveste had met he knew better than to feign understanding where none existed.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Revelation Space
“It's an ancient technique known as lying, Khouri.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Revelation Space
“You didn't weld it shut or anything like that?"
"Yes, stupid me, I forgot.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Revelation Space
“I think the deeper we go, the less likelihood we'll have of being recognised as something unwanted. It's like the human body - the greatest density of pain receptors lies in the skin.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Revelation Space
“The cards always look different when it's your turn to play them; loaded with subtly different possibilities.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Revelation Space
“Volyova felt as if her brain consisted of a room full of precocious schoolchildren: individually bright, and—if only they would pool themselves—capable of shattering insights. But some of those schoolchildren were not paying attention; they were staring dreamily out of the window, ignoring her protestations to focus on the present, because they found their own obsessions more intellectually attractive than the dull curriculum she was intent on dispensing.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Revelation Space
“Believe me, when you're dealing with infectious alien mind parasites, I always find primitive is best." Then, calmly, almost as if it were a recognised form of verbal punctuation, she took aim with the needler and gutted a rat which had dared to stray into the corridor.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Revelation Space
“It's called optimism — but I’m losing the hang of it fast.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Revelation Space
“I think I’ve reduced the amount of blood in my caffeine system to an acceptable level, if that’s what you mean.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Revelation Space
“Nightside, cities glistened in chains, and a spray of tinkertoy habitats girdled the planet. Gossamer starbridges reached from the equator towards orbit.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Revelation Space
“You're confident he'll have found him, then?"
"Well, no. I didn't sat that."
"If there's one thing I hate," Volyova said, looking coldly at the other Triumvir, "it's mindless optimism.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Revelation Space
“The cards always look different when it’s your turn to play them; loaded with subtly different possibilities.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Revelation Space
“The human capacity for grief. It just isn't capable of providing an adequate emotional response once the dead exceed a few dozen in number. And it doesn't just level off—it just gives up, resets itself to zero. Admit it. None of us feel a damn about these people.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Revelation Space
“Khouri had never really given much thought to the slowness of light. There was nothing in the universe that moved faster . . . but, as she now saw, it was glacial compared to the speed that would be needed to keep their love alive.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Revelation Space
“Dimly--at first wary that it was merely a dislodged fragment of the dream--she remembered Resurgam. And then, slowly, events returned, not as a tidal wave, or even as as landslide, but as a slow, squelching slippage: a disembowelment of the past.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Revelation Space
“You look older, son.” “Yes, well, some of us have to get on with the business of being alive in the entropic universe.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Revelation Space
“The human capacity for grief. It just isn’t capable of providing an adequate emotional response once the dead exceed a few dozen in number. And it doesn’t just level off—it just gives up, resets itself to zero.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Revelation Space
“For a moment I think we were turned into information, and that in that instant we were linked to every other piece of information ever known; every thought ever thought, or at least ever captured by the light.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Revelation Space
“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,”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Revelation Space
“Weyl curvature tensor . . . but consciousness was no”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Revelation Space
“She hesitated, aware that an ill-judged phrase might anger Triumvir Hegazi; not that she particularly cared. Dared she call it the Melding Plague, now that the Yellowstoners had given it a name? Perhaps that would be unwise.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Revelation Space
“It was better to live; better to carry a memory of a memory, than suffer the vast burden of knowing. He was not meant to think like a god.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Revelation Space
“The flare-watch in East Nekhebet had picked up an energy pulse, much brighter than anything seen previously. Briefly, there was the worrying possibility that Delta Pavonis was about to repeat the flare which had wiped out the Amarantin: the vast coronal mass ejection known as the Event. But closer examination revealed that the flare did not originate from the star, but rather from something several light-hours beyond it, on the edge of the system.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Revelation Space
“Still, it was vision, or at least vision’s idiot cousin.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Revelation Space
“That she had loved Sylveste because he was such a self-important bastard and made something noble of being a self-important bastard, did it with such utter aplomb that it became a kind of virtue, like the wearing of sackcloth”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Revelation Space
“But the trouble with simulations is that they put up with far too much shit.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Revelation Space
“them were spectres uncertain of each other’s reality. They , held each other for what seemed like many more hours than the one they had been allocated; not because time dragged, but because for now time was unimportant; it was in abeyance, and it seemed as if it could be held that way by the act of will alone.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Revelation Space
“I haven’t needed anything big enough from you to justify being pleasant, and I doubt I ever will.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Revelation Space
“Behold the wedding gun,’ the Ordinator said, holding the box aloft.”
― Alastair Reynolds, quote from Revelation Space
Alastair Reynolds
Born place: in Barry, Wales, The United Kingdom
Born date March 13, 1966
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“It was sad, like those businessmen who came to work in serious clothes but wore colorful ties in a mad, desperate attempt to show there was a free spirit in there somewhere.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Making Money
“¿Cómo no iban a apodersarse los deliriros de grandeza de un campesino del Banato si de pronto, a los veintiún años, con sólo mover unas figuritas sobre un tablero de madera, ganaba más en una semana que su pueblo entero en todo un año de talar bosques y realizar las tareas más duras?”
― Stefan Zweig, quote from Chess Story
“She imagined loving him would feel like falling in love with darkness, frightening and consuming yet utterly beautiful when the stars came out.”
― Stephanie Garber, quote from Caraval
“One always saw and sees through pretense.”
― Paul Scott, quote from The Jewel in the Crown
“It is I am sure a kind of unorthodoxy, and considered thus by some,” I hear my master say (I resume my station, still flustered and with a madly working heart), “but it is my conviction that the more religiously and intellectually enlightened a Negro is made, the better for himself, his master, and the commonweal.”
― William Styron, quote from The Confessions of Nat Turner
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