223 Quotes by Alastair Reynolds

Behold the wedding gun,’ the Ordinator said, holding the box aloft.

Humanity is an assemblage of information-processing entities, and in that regard you have potential.

Peoples think I’s a harmless idiot,” he said. “They’s only half right.

Gravity ruled, and gravity did not take into account circumstances, or the unfairness of things, or listen to eleventh-hour petitions before reluctantly repealing its laws. Gravity crushed, and near the surface of a neutron star gravity crushed absolutely, until diamond flowed like water; until a mountain collapsed into a millionth of its height.

But it’s the greater fate of the Congregation that concerns me more. Our Occupation, and how it will end. I thought it silly of Rackamore to be troubled by such a distant concern, but I find it much harder to dismiss his fears now. What is the point of any deed, good or otherwise, if this little window of civilisation of ours will soon have its end?

You don’t usually think of boredom as something similar to pain. That’s because you’ve only been exposed to it in relatively small doses. You don’t know its true colour. The difference between the boredom you know and the boredom I know is like the difference between touching snow and putting your hand in a vat of liquid nitrogen.

Just because it came from the heart didn’t make it good.

Then they’d be wrong. It’s only our deeds that make us evil, Tanner; they’re what define us, nothing else, not our intentions or feelings. But what are a few bad deeds compared to a life, especially the kinds of lives we can live now?

That’s what happens when you’ve had great success in life – when you’ve achieved the one goal you always desired. You lose a sense of purpose. Your smallest anxieties fester and magnify. Your fears turn inward, and attach themselves to irrational concerns.