223 Quotes by Alastair Reynolds

Nothing had ever existed between us except the possibility of something, and now even that was over.

Sluka shook her head. "We're talking about them in the past tense, and we never even discussed them in the present. It's like their only reason for existing was so they could die.

It’s not how far you’ve come that matters. It’s where you’ve come from.

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.

All I can say for certain is that, beneath the scrambled chaos of my memories, I feel a driving imperative, a sense of some vital task that I must complete, and which has not yet reached cessation. But I could be completely mistaken. Perhaps I was simply a tourist, ambling his way from sight to sight with no greater goal than to accumulate memories and experience - much like yourselves, in fact.

Masai and elephants. The rest is dust.

The cards always look different when it’s your turn to play them; loaded with subtly different possibilities.

Some promises are best broken. Trust me on this: I'm a politician.

Such was the nature of obsessions: no quarter given for the human cost.