“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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“I say that when she appeared, in whatever place, by the hope embodied in that marvelous greeting, for me no enemy remained, in fact I shone with a flame of charity that made me grant pardon to whoever had offended me: and if anyone had then asked me anything my reply would only have been: ‘Love’, with an aspect full of humility.”
― Dante Alighieri, quote from Vita Nuova
“--Here, my good man. Could you tell me whereabouts Horatio Street...good heavens.
Thus called upon, he took courage; the sursum corda of an extravagant belch straightened him upright, and he answered, --Whfffck? Whether this was an approach to discussion he had devised himself, or a subtle adaptation of the Socratic method of questioning perfected in the local athenaeums which he attended until closing time, was not to be known; for the answer was,
--Stand aside.”
― William Gaddis, quote from The Recognitions
“The name that no human research can discover--
But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.
When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.”
― T.S. Eliot, quote from Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats
“The sensation of the seat of a chair coming together with his drooping posteriors at last was so delicious that he rose at once and repeated the sit, lingeringly and with intense concentration. Murphy did not so often meet with these tendernesses that he could afford to treat them casually. The second sit, however, was a great disappointment.”
― Samuel Beckett, quote from Murphy
“Forty-five minutes and two-hundred wires later, Nate had transformed the spare bedroom upstairs into a video game haven. Scarlet listened to the three boys argue about the most efficient way to destroy an AWOL robot and realized she’d rather listen to Heather complain about last year’s footwear styles than one more minute of nerd-talk.
Nate pulled a few speakers from his bag.
“Surround sound, Nate? Really?” Gabriel pointed to the hall. “My bedroom is right next door. How am I supposed to sleep when you’re blasting aliens all night? Why couldn’t you just use the downstairs guest room?”
“First of all,” Nate adjusted a speaker and looked back at Gabriel, “the aliens are on my team—so I don’t ‘blast’ them. Second,” Nate’s eyes grew wide, “you know I have a wicked fear of sleeping underground. Basements are for bats and axe-murders.” He looked at Tristan. “No offense.”
Tristan shrugged.”
― Chelsea Fine, quote from Anew
Better off Friends
Revelation
The Next Together
Cam Girl
Unsouled
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