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 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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'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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'Until recently we were a trio. Before that, a quartet. Perhaps it’s just me, but I’m beginning to detect a trend.'
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All machines knew what would happen to them when their masters lost faith in their infallibility.
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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 you agree with me?''On some distant theoretical level, just possibly.'
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It was one of the oldest tricks of mob-management: give them a hate figure.
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She wondered if she could put a dart in his eye. It would not kill him, but it might take the edge off his cockiness.
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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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'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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'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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It was a glaring omission, a sign of cosmic sloppiness. Not even that, Vasko corrected himself. It was a sign of cosmic obliviousness. The universe didn’t know what was happening here. It didn’t know and it didn’t care. It didn’t even know that it didn’t know.
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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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Everything looked utterly normal, exactly as Thalia had expected save for the absence of a rampaging mob.
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'You look older, son.''Yes, well, some of us have to get on with the business of being alive in the entropic universe.'
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'That would require an unprecedented leap of faith.''I don’t do faith,' Scorpio said.
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'You seem upset by the fact that we’re hated and feared.''It does give one pause for thought.'
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'The central defect of the human mind,' Custine said, 'is its unfortunate habit of seeing patterns where none exist. Of course, that is also its chief asset.''But sometimes a very dangerous one.'
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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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She would worry, just as you worry. It’s the people who don’t worry-those who never have any doubts that what they’re doing is good and right-they’re the ones that cause the problems.
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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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One trusted machines. But one never expected machines to return the favor.
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It was bad, but it was some other slightly less piquant flavour of bad.