Alastair Reynolds Quotes
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Memo to himself: the one way to make people panic was to warn them not to.
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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 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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It was bad, but it was some other slightly less piquant flavour of bad.
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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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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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'You seem upset by the fact that we’re hated and feared.''It does give one pause for thought.'
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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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She’d walked a delicate line with commendable skill.But sometimes the best case wasn’t good enough.
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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 was one of the oldest tricks of mob-management: give them a hate figure.
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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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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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It seemed that she had not so much misjudged the woman as assigned her to completely the wrong species.
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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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'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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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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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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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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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 battle sunk towards the horizon. Presently it would be gone, leaving a sky unsullied by human affairs.
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One trusted machines. But one never expected machines to return the favor.