Alastair Reynolds Quotes
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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.'
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But sanity, Vasko decided, was like the pattern of lights he could see through his cabin window. In almost any direction the only way to travel was into darkness, and there was a lot more darkness than light.
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Just because something had spawned a myth did not automatically mean it had to contain anything of substance.
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'I feel as if I’m missing all the excitement.''In my experience,' Tunguska said, making himself a temporary seat, 'excitement is always better when it happens to other people.'
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'Is there anyone or anything in this city which can’t be bought?' I said, slipping him a note.'Yeah,' the man said, laughing quietly. 'But I’m not it.'
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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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'You can hardly blame them.''Assuming stupidity is an inherited trait, then no, I can’t.'
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I was going to call it a mistake, but you could argue that there are no mistakes in war, only fortunate and less fortunate events.
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'Can I still wish you good luck?''You can wish me what the hell you like. It won’t make any difference. If it did, it would mean I hadn’t prepared well enough.
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'I thought debate was supposed to be healthy,' she countered.'It is,' Auger replied, 'so long as you don’t disagree with me.'
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By and large these attempts to rewrite history were not taken seriously, but it was disconcerting to hear that they had gained even a toehold.
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Evolution doesn’t greatly care about what happens to creatures once they’ve passed on their genetic heritage.
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And even if what they showed you is true, that doesn’t begin to make it right. The cause might be just, Felka, but history’s littered with atrocities committed in the name of righteousness.
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Don’t overestimate your familiarity with technologies you barely understand. It could be your undoing.
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'I don’t like this at all,' Hegazi said.'Believe me,' Sylveste said, 'you’re about to like it a lot less.'
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It was a numbers game, not a guaranteed method of avoiding being killed, but Clavain had been a soldier long enough to know that this was, ultimately, what most combat situations boiled down to.
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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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Nice girls don’t carry guns.
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War does strange things to truth.