223 Quotes by Alastair Reynolds

I couldn't ever write a straight crime novel: there'd be an intrusion of weirdness at some point.

I am playing in a playground that's already been played in. I am always aware that a lot of the furniture in science fiction is second hand.

A city’s only ever three hot meals away from anarchy.

There was no call for that,” Father said. “I’ve never been so – ” “Humiliated?” Adrana finished for him. “You know what the real humiliation is? Being a Ness, that’s what. Grovelling our way up the Mazarile social ladder, trying to pretend we’re something we’re not.

I think I’ve reduced the amount of blood in my caffeine system to an acceptable level.

It’s called optimism – but I’m losing the hang of it fast.

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.

Dimly – at first wary that it was merely a dislodged fragment of the dream – she remembered Resurgam. And then, slowly, events returned, not as a tidal wave, or even as as landslide, but as a slow, squelching slippage: a disembowelment of the past.

We all have it in us to be something other than what we are, I thought, but we don’t often get a glimpse of what we could have been.