Alastair Reynolds Quotes
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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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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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She’d walked a delicate line with commendable skill.But sometimes the best case wasn’t good enough.
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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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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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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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It was bad, but it was some other slightly less piquant flavour of bad.
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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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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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'You seem upset by the fact that we’re hated and feared.''It does give one pause for thought.'
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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 was one of the oldest tricks of mob-management: give them a hate figure.
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He had never lost that mingled combination of awe and terror that welled up in him when confronted by the routinely huge distances of space.
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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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'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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It seemed that she had not so much misjudged the woman as assigned her to completely the wrong species.
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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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'I’m hoping no one will be quite that stupid,' Sparver said. 'Then again, this is baseline humans we’re dealing with.'
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Who was it who said that a wise man speaks when he has something to say, but a fool speaks because he must?
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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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The future might have been crammed with miracles and wonders, but it also offered truly awesome opportunities for screwing up.
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The battle sunk towards the horizon. Presently it would be gone, leaving a sky unsullied by human affairs.
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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.'