Alastair Reynolds famous quotes

05-24-2025

Nightside, cities glistened in chains, and a spray of tinkertoy habitats girdled the planet. Gossamer starbridges reached from the equator towards orbit.
-- Alastair Reynolds

#Cities #Orbit #Habitat
To see something marvelous with your own eyes-that's wonderful enough. But when two of you see it, two of you together, holding hands, holding each other close, knowing that you'll both have that memory for the rest of your lives, but that each of you will only ever hold only have an incomplete half of it, and that it won't ever really exist as a whole until you're together, talking or thinking about that moment ...that's worth more than one plus one. It's worth four, or eight, or some number so large we can't even imagine it.
-- Alastair Reynolds

#Memories #Eye #Thinking
Victory loses its meaning without the memory of what you've vanquished.
-- Alastair Reynolds

#Memories #Victory
It's an ancient technique known as lying, Khouri.
-- Alastair Reynolds

#Lying #Technique #Ancient
Autocratic governments are masters of self-contradiction. They say one thing, do another.
-- Alastair Reynolds

#Government #Self #Contradiction
Without risk in our lives, we're scarcely better than machines ourselves.
-- Alastair Reynolds

#Risk #Machines
I really struggle to pinpoint whether I became a scientist because I like science fiction, or did I gravitate to science fiction because I identified strongly with scientists.
-- Alastair Reynolds

#Struggle #Fiction #Scientist
At one time, the treatment for a certain kind of psychosis had been to push an ice pick up through the orbit of the eye, into the frontal lobe; the ice pick was then stirred around until it reduced the problematic brain tissue to non-functioning porridge.
-- Alastair Reynolds

#Eye #Psychosis #Ice
Itâ€™s the people who donâ€™t worryâ€”those who never have any doubts that what theyâ€™re doing is good and rightâ€”theyâ€™re the ones that cause the problems.
-- Alastair Reynolds

#People #Worry #Doubt
I think I've reduced the amount of blood in my caffeine system to an acceptable level.
-- Alastair Reynolds

#Thinking #Blood #Levels
It looked like a biology lesson for gods, or a snapshot of the kind of ***** which might be enjoyed by sentient planets.
-- Alastair Reynolds

#Snapshots #Lessons #Might
How did you . . . pass the time?â€™ Sunday asked. â€˜You couldnâ€™t just ching out of it, could you?â€™ â€˜We had a different form of chinging,â€™ Eunice said. â€˜An earlier type of virtual-reality technology, much more robust and completely unaffected by time lag. You may have heard of it. We called it â€œreadingâ€.
-- Alastair Reynolds

#Reading #Sunday #Technology
You worry that we're becoming monsters. Merlin, we already were monsters. You didn't make us any worse.
-- Alastair Reynolds

#Worry #Monsters #Becoming
As the old saying went, the Manhattan Project wasn't built in a day. Or was that Rome? Something to do with Earth, anyway.
-- Alastair Reynolds

#Rome #Manhattan #Earth
Enjoy it, kid. Enjoy feeling that you can make a difference.' Floyd flashed him a smile. 'It won't last for ever.
-- Alastair Reynolds

#Kids #Differences #Feelings
A city's only ever three hot meals away from anarchy.
-- Alastair Reynolds

#Cities #Hot #Meals

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