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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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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'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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'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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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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It seemed that she had not so much misjudged the woman as assigned her to completely the wrong species.
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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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'You seem upset by the fact that we’re hated and feared.''It does give one pause for thought.'
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His parents had abdicated responsibility to an illusion.
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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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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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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’d walked a delicate line with commendable skill.But sometimes the best case wasn’t good enough.
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Memo to himself: the one way to make people panic was to warn them not to.
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It was one of the oldest tricks of mob-management: give them a hate figure.
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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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'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 battle sunk towards the horizon. Presently it would be gone, leaving a sky unsullied by human affairs.
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'But at least you cared. At least you were ready to do something.''This little mess,' Auger said, 'is all because of people who were ready to do something. People like me, who always know when they’re right and everyone else is wrong. Maybe what we need is a few less of us.'
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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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You are that rarest of creatures: a man with the wisdom to see beyond his own time.
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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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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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One trusted machines. But one never expected machines to return the favor.