Alastair Reynolds Quotes
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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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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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All machines knew what would happen to them when their masters lost faith in their infallibility.
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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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'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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Everything looked utterly normal, exactly as Thalia had expected save for the absence of a rampaging mob.
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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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'That would require an unprecedented leap of faith.''I don’t do faith,' Scorpio said.
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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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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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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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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 seemed that she had not so much misjudged the woman as assigned her to completely the wrong species.
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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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'You seem upset by the fact that we’re hated and feared.''It does give one pause for thought.'
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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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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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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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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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'That’s how it went, wasn’t it Zebra?''It might,' she said. 'If I happened to be colluding in your own delusions.'
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The future might have been crammed with miracles and wonders, but it also offered truly awesome opportunities for screwing up.