35 Quotes & Sayings By Alastair Reynolds

Alastair Reynolds is a British writer who was born in York. Reynolds grew up in a small town in England and started reading while he was very young. He saw his first science fiction book when he was about nine years old. He published his first novel, Revelation Space, in 1998 Read more

The book won the Arthur C. Clarke award for best science fiction novel of the year. In 2001 Reynolds published Chasm City, which won the Hugo award for best novella.

In 2009 he released Chasm City: Evolution, a collection of articles and essays on the development of the book, all under a single theme: evolution and its relevance to science fiction writing. In 2011 Reynolds published Diamond Dogs: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, a children's book illustrated by Brian Godfrey that teaches children how to do math and includes a physical simulation of the title diamond dogs. In 2013 he published Fearful Symmetry: A Novel, but it took him four years to write it because of an illness during which he lost his memory.

In 2015 he published The Prefect, which is about a search for a new kind of supercomputer that can accurately predict everything from nuclear wars to the stock market crash to your next date with your lover.

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Cyphel knew exactly how he felt about her as well – it was there in her expression whenever they spoke that beguiling combination of amusement and haughtiness that she carried off so well. It was a look that expressed disdain at Campion’s guarded advances but also a kind of measured probationary respect as well. It was a look that said You dare to think that I will find you as interesting as you obviously find me Well perhaps in that very act of daring you become interesting to me if only fleetingly. Alastair Reynolds
2
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”. Alastair Reynolds
A city's only ever three hot meals away from anarchy.
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A city's only ever three hot meals away from anarchy. Alastair Reynolds
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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? Alastair Reynolds
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Consider all the inanimate matter in the universe, all the dumb atoms, all the mindless molecules, all the oblivious dust grains and pebbles and rocks and iceballs and worlds and stars, all the unthinking galaxies and superclusters, wheeling through the oblivious time-haunted megaparsecs of the cosmic supervoid. In all that immensity, she had somehow contrived to BE a human being, a microscopically tiny, cosmically insignificant bundle of information-processing systems, wired to a mind more structurally complex than the Milky Way itself, maybe even more complex than the rest of the *whole damned universe*! . Alastair Reynolds
6
Yves Klein said it was the essence of colour itself: the colour that stood for all other colours. A man once spent his entire life searching for a particular shade of blue that he remembered encountering in childhood. He began to despair of ever finding it, thinking he must have imagined that precise shade, that it could not possibly exist in nature. Then one day he chanced upon it. It was the colour of a beetle in a museum of natural history. He wept for joy.’- "Zima Blue" by Alastair Reynolds . Alastair Reynolds
7
Making love was a game of echoes. We had shared memories so many times that when I made love to her, I knew exactly how it felt to be Purslane. I could taste and feel her other lovers and she could taste and feel mine, each experience reaching away like a reflection in a hall of mirrors, diminishing into a kind of carnal background radiation, a sea of sensuous experience. I had been a girl once, then a thousand men and women and all their lovers. The stasis field locked on. The Synchromesh took hold. I hurtled into my own future, while my ship ate space and time.- "House of Suns" by Alastair Reynolds. Alastair Reynolds
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Half of all the great art and literature in existence went unrecognised during the lifetimes of its creators. Alastair Reynolds
9
The human capacity for grief. It just isn't capable of providing an adequate emotional response once the dead exceed a few dozen in number. And it doesn't just level off–it just gives up, resets itself to zero. Admit it. None of us feel a damn about these people. Alastair Reynolds
10
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. Alastair Reynolds
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It’s not how far you’ve come that matters. It’s where you’ve come from. Alastair Reynolds
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To see something marvellous with your own eyes - that’s wonderful enough. But when two of you see it, two of you together, holding hands, holding each other close, knowing that you’ll both have that memory for the rest of your lives, but that each of you will only ever hold an incomplete half of it, and that it won’t ever really exist as a whole until you’re together, talking or thinking about that moment .. that’s worth more than one plus one. It’s worth four, or eight, or some number so large we can’t even imagine it. . Alastair Reynolds
13
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. Alastair Reynolds
14
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. Alastair Reynolds
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It's called optimism – but I’m losing the hang of it fast. Alastair Reynolds
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You're confident he'll have found him, then?"" Well, no. I didn't sat that."" If there's one thing I hate, " Volyova said, looking coldly at the other Triumvir, "it's mindless optimism. Alastair Reynolds
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It is always better to try and fail than not to try. Alastair Reynolds
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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. Alastair Reynolds
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Still, it was vision, or at least vision’s idiot cousin. Alastair Reynolds
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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? Alastair Reynolds
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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. Alastair Reynolds
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Nothing had ever existed between us except the possibility of something, and now even that was over. Alastair Reynolds
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That she had loved Sylveste because he was such a self-important bastard and made something noble of being a self-important bastard, did it with such utter aplomb that it became a kind of virtue, like the wearing of sackcloth Alastair Reynolds
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No act of knowledge acquisition is entirely without risk. Alastair Reynolds
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Without risk in our lives, we’re scarcely better than machines ourselves. Alastair Reynolds
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Victory loses its meaning without the memory of what you've vanquished. Alastair Reynolds
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Enjoy it, kid. Enjoy feeling that you can make a difference.' Floyd flashed him a smile. 'It won't last for ever. Alastair Reynolds
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Mathematics is a terrible calling. It’s as merciless as gravity. It swallows the soul. There’s a point near a black hole called the last stable orbit. Once you drop below that radius, no force in the universe can stop you falling all the way in. That’s what happened to your mother — she swam too close to theory, fell below the last stable orbit. Alastair Reynolds
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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 Alastair Reynolds
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There's such a thing as free will, Tanner. You didn't have to go along with me, unless you want to admit your brain is ruled by your dick. And I didn't get the impression you regretted any of that. Alastair Reynolds
31
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. Alastair Reynolds
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For a moment I think we were turned into information, and that in that instant we were linked to every other piece of information ever known; every thought ever thought, or at least ever captured by the light. Alastair Reynolds
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You worry that we're becoming monsters. Merlin, we already were monsters. You didn't make us any worse. Alastair Reynolds
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I'm not a morning person: I can't function until I've had a coffee - or several. Alastair Reynolds