Alastair Reynolds Quotes
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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 don’t question your loyalty, Skade. I just wonder exactly what it is you’re loyal to.
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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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'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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Clavain felt little in the way of regret; more a sense of quiet relief that they were past the negotiating stage and into the infinitely more honest arena of actual battle.
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'Haven’t you ever heard of morale-building?' Khouri had asked.'Heard of it,' Volyova said. 'Don’t happen to agree with it. Would you rather be happy and dead, or scared and alive?'
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All machines knew what would happen to them when their masters lost faith in their infallibility.
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'Personally,' Scorpio said, 'I think it’s time to stop thinking chivalry and start thinking artillery.'
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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 like men mathematics with any great agility, but now I sensed it as a hard grid of truth underlying everything: bones shining through the thin flesh of the world.
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'There’s a catch,' Skellsgard said.'Another one? But of course there is. You know, I’m thinking I should start a collection.'
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Maps had never really been his thing, even during his days under Scorpio in Chasm City. There, it had hardly mattered. Blood’s motto had always been that if you needed a map to find your way around a neighbourhood, you were already in trouble.
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'It must be a real one-horse town.'Auger shook her head as she lit a cigarette. 'It has wild ambitions of becoming a one-horse town.'
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'What happened?''Let’s just say my efforts to reprogram the weapon were not an unqualified success, shall we, and leave it at that?' She hated discussing failure almost as much as she hated the thing itself.
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There was something about the cocksure confidence of that statement that gave Auger goose pimples. It was like an invitation to fate.
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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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Everything looked utterly normal, exactly as Thalia had expected save for the absence of a rampaging mob.
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It seemed that she had not so much misjudged the woman as assigned her to completely the wrong species.
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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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'Don’t you agree with me?''On some distant theoretical level, just possibly.'
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'That would require an unprecedented leap of faith.''I don’t do faith,' Scorpio said.
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In Clavain’s experience, it was the less comforting possibility that generally turned out to be the case. It was the way the universe worked.
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The future might have been crammed with miracles and wonders, but it also offered truly awesome opportunities for screwing up.
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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.