223 Quotes by Alastair Reynolds

There was something heartbreakingly beautiful about the lights of distant ships, I thought. It was something that touched both on human achievement and the vastness against which those achievements seemed so frail. It was the same thing whether the lights belonged to a caravel battling the swell on a stormy horizon or a diamond-hulled starship which had just sliced its way through interstellar space.

To Sky, Clown had become something to be understood; something to be dissected and parameterised. Clown, he now recognised, was something like the bubble-drawing the dolphin had made in the water: a projection carved from light rather than sound.

Half of all the great art and literature in existence went unrecognised during the lifetimes of its creators.

You worry that we're becoming monsters. Merlin, we already were monsters. You didn't make us any worse.

Even monsters are beautiful.

No act of knowledge acquisition is entirely without risk.

It’s one thing to be given a big boxful of theory and quite another to make an engine out of it.

Without risk in our lives, we’re scarcely better than machines ourselves.

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