223 Quotes by Alastair Reynolds

What you encountered was an abomination, a military intelligence. It was designed to be insidious and spiteful and inimical to life, and it wasn't smart enough to have a conscience.

While there were still children in the universe, and while children could still be enchanted by something as simple and wonderful as a flower, there was still a reason to keep looking, a reason to keep believing.

How did you . . . pass the time?’ Sunday asked. ‘You couldn’t just ching out of it, could you?’‘We had a different form of chinging,’ Eunice said. ‘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 “reading”.

We're all Poseidon's children, Geoffrey: whether we like it or not.""Poseidon's children," he repeated. "Is that supposed to mean something?""We came through. That's all. We weathered the absolute worst that history could throw at us, and we thrived. Now it's time to start doing something useful with our lives.

It is always better to try and fail than not to try.

I don't know." That was typical Sajaki; like all the genuinely clever people Sylveste had met he knew better than to feign understanding where none existed.

But you will come to regret this, Abigail. This won’t be like one of the memories that fritters away into nothing when you come out of that game. This will leave a stain. You’ll carry for it for ever, when you could have had a few more years of blissful innocence. Are you sure, now?

It was created to endure for a specific moment in time. Like a sandcastle, or an ice sculpture. Here, and then gone. In a way, that's the beauty of it. Who'd marvel at a sandcastle, if sandcastles lasted forever?

History is what we write, not what we remember. Why should we tarnish the memory of our planet by enshrining our less then noble deeds?