Alastair Reynolds Quotes
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I’m fed up with everyone being lied to just because the administration thinks it’s in our best interests not to know all the facts.
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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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'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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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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Charm was what he excelled at. If anyone sensed his underlying shallowness, they usually mistook it for well-hidden great depth of character, like misinterpreting a radar bounce.
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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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There were choices to be made, harder choices than I would have liked, and I realised that I had been neglecting them because of their very difficulty.
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'But you can be sure there are pockets of wealth and influence, and I’m willing to wager that a few people are wealthier and more influential than they were before.''That’s always the way with disasters,' I said.'What?''They’re never bad news for everyone. Something nasty always rises to the top.'
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'Is that as bad as it sounds?' Floyd asked.'No,' Auger said. 'It’s worse. A lot worse.'
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Am I that fascinating to you, or are you just more bored than I imagined?
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But when she tried to say something, the words always seemed trite and inadequate. Nothing measured up. When any moment might be their last, there was nothing she could ever imagine saying that had the necessary dignity to fill that instant. Silence was better. Silence had its own dignity.
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'How are the internal complications, anyway? Aren’t the other branches of government getting a little suspicious about all these machinations?''Let’s just say that one or two discreet assassinations may still have to be performed,' Khouri said.
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They screwed with democracy. I’m not going to lose much sleep when democracy screws them back.
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Rashmika could tell when anyone around her was lying. But seeing through her own deceptions was another matter entirely.
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It was his experience that crises in space fell into two categories: those that killed you immediately, usually without much warning, and those that gave you plenty of time to ruminate on the problem, even if no solution was very likely.
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They had been in love, desperately in love, but the universe cared nothing for the vicissitudes of the human heart.
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The one thing I never counted on was having luck on my side.It was generally simpler that way.
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For someone admitting guilt she sounded remarkably void of repentance.
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'All right, Marius-I get the message. In fact I intercepted it, parsed it, filtered it, decrypted it with the appropriate onetime pad and wrote a fucking two-hundred-page report on it. Satisfied?''I’m never satisfied, Mishenka. It just isn’t in my nature.'
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'Is he dangerous?'Anyone who lies for a living is dangerous.'
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'You can hardly blame them.''Assuming stupidity is an inherited trait, then no, I can’t.'
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Afterwards, when Clavain tried to imaging how he might describe it, he found that words were never going to be adequate for the task. And that was no surprise: evolution had shaped language to convey many concepts, but going from a single to a networked topology of self was not amongst them.
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'Tanner, are you insane?''Very probably several kinds of insane,' I said. 'But I’m afraid it doesn’t change anything. I’m perfectly happy with my current delusional system.'