Quotes from Alastair Reynolds

For smart monkeys, we can, when the mood takes us, be exceedingly stupid.

Life was indeed a continuous lesson in finding ways to be less troubled by certain things, so that we might make room for new concerns

Distance can breed suspicion, and it can make enemies hardly worthy of consideration as human beings. Much easier to consider killing.

Fescue poured the remains of his wine into my ocean. "Until then we need a degree of focus." "Focus yourself," I said, turning away.

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.

organised structure is the most precious thing in the universe

This is life. It's not a dress rehearsal. If we don't do this now, we may as well start planning our own funerals.

But a constant, low-level background of crime may help a society become more robust, more resilient.

Very few worthwhile things are not difficult, in some fashion

I wished that adults were as capable as children of moving beyond some impasse, letting go of whatever had been intractable only hours or days ago. I envied them that ability to discard their past selves as if they were old, tattered, useless skins.

Sometimes you just have to hold on, to keep doing what you're doing, to have faith that things are going to get better. It's how we survive. There've been a million bottlenecks in history where things would have turned out much worse if we'd all just given up and accepted the inevitable. Some of those bottlenecks would have ended us if a few irrational, doggedly optimistic souls hadn't clung to a thread of hope

There's no point delegating a decision if you won't accept the outcome.

I might not be human. I might be nothing more than a set of algorithms, running on a spacesuit with a corpse inside it. But I'm not a monster.

Prozor took the head off her beer with a swipe of her hand, then licked at her palm with an unhurried catlike attentiveness.

A slash and a dot," he said. "I doubt it means anything to you, but this was once the mark of an alliance of progressive thinkers linked together by one of the very first computer networks. The Federation of Polities can trace its existence right back to that fragile collective, in the early decades of the Void Century.

Posterity is not kind to mathematicians who make errors.

When Heckel spoke, his voice emerged from a miniature pipe organ projecting from the top of his helmet. He had to keep making adjustments to knobs in his chest area to stop the voice becoming too shrill or deep.

shown beneath the map of the galaxy - was an outrageous confection of a planet: a striped marshmallow giant with a necklace of sugary rings, combed and braided by the resonant forces of a dozen glazed and candied moons.

The games enthralled the public and diverted their attentions from the Halo wars. And—unlike the arts—they could not be used as vehicles for subversion. For gamers like myself it was a near-utopian state of affairs. We were pampered and courted by the houses and made immensely rich.

That we wouldn't be able to do. Not even if we wanted it more than anything in the world. Because once we've touched a world, it stays touched.

Given up, Khouri? It's not in my dictionary.

She hugged him, then kissed him. Then she was gone. He never saw her again.

She wanted him to become cleverer, so that she could become cleverer still.

I'll argue to the death against stupid legislation, but some rules exist for a reason.