Quotes by Alastair Reynolds

“How did you . . . pass the time? Sunday asked. You couldnt just ching out of it, could you?We had a different form of chinging, Eunice said. An earlier type of virtual-reality technology, much more...”

“A city's only ever three hot meals away from anarchy.”

“Consider all the inanimate matter in the universe, all the dumb atoms, all the mindless molecules, all the oblivious dust grains and pebbles and rocks and iceballs and worlds and stars, all the unt...”

“Yves Klein said it was the essence of colour itself: the colour that stood for all other colours. A man once spent his entire life searching for a particular shade of blue that he remembered encoun...”

“Making love was a game of echoes. We had shared memories so many times that when I made love to her, I knew exactly how it felt to be Purslane. I could taste and feel her other lovers and she could...”

“Half of all the great art and literature in existence went unrecognised during the lifetimes of its creators.”

“Cyphel knew exactly how he felt about her as well it was there in her expression whenever they spoke that beguiling combination of amusement and haughtiness that she carried off so well. It was a ...”

“History is what we write, not what we remember. Why should we tarnish the memory of our planet by enshrining our less then noble deeds?”

“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, s...”

“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 offit just gives up, resets its...”

“Its not how far youve come that matters. Its where youve come from.”

“To see something marvellous with your own eyes - thats wonderful enough. But when two of you see it, two of you together, holding hands, holding each other close, knowing that youll both have that ...”

“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...”

“Sluka shook her head. "We're talking about them in the past tense, and we never even discussed them in the present. It's like their only reason for existing was so they could die.”

“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.”

“Still, it was vision, or at least visions idiot cousin.”

“But you will come to regret this, Abigail. This wont be like one of the memories that fritters away into nothing when you come out of that game. This will leave a stain. Youll carry for it for ever...”

“It's called optimism but Im losing the hang of it fast.”

“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.”

“It is always better to try and fail than not to try.”