Alastair Reynolds Quotes
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He’s not really a religious man, but he knows which side his bread’s buttered on. The churches pay his salary, so he doesn’t want anyone rocking the boat with unorthodox rumours.
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His parents had abdicated responsibility to an illusion.
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But make no mistake. My counterpart is capable of a great deal of ruthlessness in pursuit of a just cause. He believes he has right on his side. And men who think they have right on their side are always the most dangerous sort.
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I don’t question your loyalty, Skade. I just wonder exactly what it is you’re loyal to.
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Clavain saw it all with sudden, heart-stopping clarity: all that mattered was the here and now. All that mattered was survival. Sentience that bowed down and accepted its own extinction-no matter what the long-term arguments, no matter how good the greater cause-was not the kind of sentience he was interested in preserving.
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'I’ll survive,' Floyd said. 'I’m a private detective. If I don’t get clouted on the head at least once a week, I’m not doing my job properly.'
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Naqi suspected that the ability to turn drunkenness on and off like a switch must be one of the most hallowed of diplomatic skills.
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The simple fact was that she no longer hated them as a matter of principle. It was also a source of shameful amazement that she could ever have wasted so much energy on groundless prejudice, when acceptance and tolerance would have been the easier, even the lazier, course.
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'Tell me, scientist to scientist, do you honestly think it will work?''We won’t know until we try,' Naqi said. Any other answer would have been politically hazardous: too much optimism and the politicians would have started asking just why the expensive project was needed in the first place. Too much pessimism and they would ask exactly the same question.
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'Besides-we all know guns don’t kill people,do they?''No, it’s the small metal projectiles that generally do the killing,' Cahuella said, smiling.
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Memo to himself: the one way to make people panic was to warn them not to.
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As always, it was necessary to strike a balance between a cavalier disregard for the rules and a professional understanding that some rules were more flexible than others.
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'Maybe it’s not as bad as she fears. Old people always think the world is going to ruin. It’s their job.''Maybe they’re right,' Floyd replied.
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The Jugglers store patterns, but they seldom show any sign of comprehending actual content. We’re dealing with a mindless biological archiving system, a museum without a curator.
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'Personally,' Scorpio said, 'I think it’s time to stop thinking chivalry and start thinking artillery.'
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'A splendidly inept thing,' Sylveste said, nodding despite himself.'What?''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.'
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Anxiety is a useful tool: it forces us to make plans. But when too much anxiety freezes us into indecision, it needs checking.
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She’d walked a delicate line with commendable skill.But sometimes the best case wasn’t good enough.
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'Don’t tell me you aren’t the slightest bit curious, Norquinco.''I hope you burn in hell, Sky Haussmann.''I’ll take that as a yes.'
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Afterwards, when Clavain tried to imaging how he might describe it, he found that words were never going to be adequate for the task. And that was no surprise: evolution had shaped language to convey many concepts, but going from a single to a networked topology of self was not amongst them.
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'I gather you were all too busy killing each other.''That’s a fairly reductive summary of our history, but I don’t suppose it’s too far from the truth.'
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For whatever reason, I am now fully conscious. Perhaps all beta-levels are capable of this, or perhaps my sheer connectional complexity ensured that I exceeded some state of critical mass. I have no idea. All I know is that I think, and therefore I’m exceedingly angry.
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No one ever took music away from me, but I’m damned if it ever sounds quite as good as it used to when I was twenty.
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I’m just saying that right now we could all use a degree of perspective. Because this is not the end of the world.