Alastair Reynolds

"“Do you think it means anything?” “Probably not," Ricasso said, wiping his dust-smeared hands on his knees. “I’m all for looking for meaning in ancient texts. But now and then you have to just accept the fact that you’re dealing with so much religious gibberish.”"

"Welcome to politics, Doctor. We don’t get to pick our allies. The best we can hope for is that we don’t despise them quite as much as our enemies."

"Hopefully they’ll accept me for what I am, not what I was. That’s all we can ever hope for, isn’t it?"

"It was easy to sound that confident; less easy to believe it in his heart. They had got this far did not give them an automatic guarantee of success. The world did not work like that. It took pleasure in punishing the cocksure."

"She was pointing into the empty, angel-less heavens beyond. Everything else. The universe."

"What you encountered was an abomination, a military intelligence. It was designed to be insidious and spiteful and inimical to life, and it wasn’t smart enough to have a conscience."

"“We’re pushing into deep space now—Trans-Neptunian, the inner boundary of the Kuiper belt, and we’ve even got machines in the Oort cloud. That’s where it gets stickier. If we’re going to do anything useful out there, we’ll need smart machines and lots of them. Machines that break right through the existing cognition thresholds, into post-artilect computation. Human-level thinkers that can live with us, be our equals as well as our workers.” “You’re not sounding any less scary than you were five minutes ago,” Geoffrey said. “Look, in a thousand years, the difference between people and machines…It’s going to seem about as relevant as the difference between Protestants and Catholics: some ludicrous relic of Dark Age thinking.”"

"“So you've no qualms.” “Qualms?” Merlin set down the papers he had been leafing through. “I've so many qualms they’re in danger of self-organizing. I occasionally have a thought that isn’t a qualm. But I’ll tell you this. Sometimes you just have to do the obvious thing. They have an item I need, and there’s a favor I can do for them. It’s that simple. Not everything in the universe is a riddle.”"

"Maybe if you weren’t busy throwing rocks at each other, you could spend a little time on the other niceties of life, such as cooperation and mutual advancement."

"Even time travel becomes normal when it’s your day job."

"I had never understood mathematics with any great agility, but now I sensed it as a hard grid of truth underlying everything: bones shining through the thin flesh of the world."

"The Jugglers store patterns, but they seldom show any sign of comprehending actual content. We’re dealing with a mindless biological archiving system, a museum without a curator."

"A single data point—even a single clutch of measurements—could not usually prove or disprove anything, but it might later turn out to play a vital role in a chain of argument, even if it was only in the biasing of some statistical distribution closer to one hypothesis than another. Science, as Naqi had long since realised, was as much a swarming, social process as it was something driven by ecstatic moments of personal discovery. It was something she was proud to be part of."

"Naqi suspected that the ability to turn drunkenness on and off like a switch must be one of the most hallowed of diplomatic skills."

"“Tell me, scientist to scientist, do you honestly think it will work?” “We won’t know until we try,” Naqi said. Any other answer would have been politically hazardous: too much optimism and the politicians would have started asking just why the expensive project was needed in the first place. Too much pessimism and they would ask exactly the same question."

"We don’t aspire to genetic unity, no matter what your propagandists think. The pursuit of optima leads only to local minima. We honour our errors. We actively seek persistent disequilibrium."

"Afterwards, when Clavain tried to imaging how he might describe it, he found that words were never going to be adequate for the task. And that was no surprise: evolution had shaped language to convey many concepts, but going from a single to a networked topology of self was not amongst them."

"Clavain had been a soldier. He had killed more people than he could remember, even though those days had been a long time ago. It was really a lot less difficult to do when you had a cause to believe in."

"“Only trying to make conversation, friend.” “Don’t bother—it’s an overrated activity at the best of times.”"

"“All right, Marius—I get the message. In fact I intercepted it, parsed it, filtered it, decrypted it with the appropriate onetime pad and wrote a fucking two-hundred-page report on it. Satisfied?” “I’m never satisfied, Mishenka. It just isn’t in my nature.”"

"Is this a personal grudge or are you just psychotic?"

"You’ve been good to me, Inigo. But I really am like the weather. You can admire me, even love me, in your way, but I can’t love you back. To me you’re like a photograph. I can see right through you, examine you from all angles. You amuse me. But you don’t have enough depth ever to fascinate me."

"Grafenwalder shoots a sidelong glance at Ursula Goodglass, wondering what their marriage must be like. Clearly sex isn’t in the cards, but he doubts that it was ever the main interest in their lives. Games, especially those of prestige and subterfuge, are amongst the chief entertainments of the Rust Belt moneyed."

"War does strange things to truth."

"Pretty smart piece of thinkware by all accounts: full Turing compliance; about as clever as you can make a machine before you have to start giving it human rights."

"“Is he dead?” Irravel asked. “Depends what you mean by dead.”"

"Loosen up. I need reverence like I need a skateboard."

"She rapped on for a while about how the nineties milieu was best addressed as a system of infections: sexual illnesses, rogue advertising slogans, computer viruses, proliferating junk mail…the kind of jive that had spread into all the glossy style magazines, as if, she mused, the viral paradigm was a metavirus in its own right."

"“The old murals came from the heart,” Zima said. “I painted on a huge scale because that was what the subject matter seemed to demand.” “It was good work,” I said. “It was hack work. Huge, loud, demanding, popular, but ultimately soulless. Just because it came from the heart didn’t make it good.”"

"Some people get it. Most people never will. But that’s art."

"Truth is truth, no matter who else believes it."

"Ghosts are not the souls of the dead, but the souls of people written out of history when history changes."

"“Still don’t trust us?” “First rule of complex systems,” I said. “You can’t tell friends from enemies.”"

"“You’re quite right: that theory is taken a bit less seriously.” “But it isn’t discredited, is it?” “You can’t discredit an untestable hypothesis.”"

"But you know what? I don’t care If transferring your anger onto me helps you, go ahead. I was the billionaire CEO of a global company. I was doing something wrong if I didn’t wake up with a million knives in my back."

"The only thing driving us on was greed. Fucking greed. The only thing in the universe stronger than fear."

"The universe always feels old, though. That’s a universal truth, a universal fact of life. It felt old for her, already cobwebbed by history. Hard for us to grasp, I know. Human civilisation, it’s just the last scratch on the last scratch on the last scratch, on the last layer of everything. We’re noise. Dirt. We haven’t begun to leave a trace."

"It was the wrong approach. But it was the only way we—they—could see at the time. So we mustn’t mock them for their mistakes. In two hundred years, someone will be just as quick to mock us for ours, if we’re not careful."

"That was my plan. But there is an old saying about plans and war. I would have done well to heed it."

"You owned the world when you were a young man, felt it like it was fashioned to fit your hands. You could do anything with it you wanted to. But the world kept changing, and sooner or later there came a day when it didn’t feel like you were the one the world was interested in any more."

"“And what keeps you going, exactly?” “Insulting my friends. Making new ones, to compensate for the ones I already insulted just a bit too much. You’d be surprised how much work those activities demand of me—it’s practically a full-time occupation.” “In fairness, you’re getting very good at it.”"

"There’s nothing like a stupid, accidental death to remind you of the supreme futility of everything."

"All of it is physics, though, whether you are studying starlings or quarks."

"“Imagine a permanent, shivering gloom, and never a moment without hunger, thirst and exhaustion. Imagine the constant fear of suffering illness or injury.” “You’ve just described nine-tenths of human history.”"

"“Something worse.” After a silence Dreyfus said: “If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that there’s always something worse.” “Yes. Odd that that should be what keeps us going, but there it is. We take our comforts where we may.”"

"In its purest distillation beauty had always been merciless."

"“Are you sharpness personified?” Khouri poured herself a few final sips of coffee and then left the rest of it on the stove for when she got back. Coffee was her only vice, one acquired in her soldiering days on the Edge. The trick was to reach a knife-edge of alertness, but not be so buzzing that she could not point the weapon without shaking. “I think I’ve reduced the amount of blood in my caffeine system to an acceptable level, if that’s what you mean.”"

"“It’s all in the fine print. You should read it sometime.” “When I’m gripped by existential boredom,” Khouri said, “I might try it.”"

"She wondered if she could put a dart in his eye. It would not kill him, but it might take the edge off his cockiness."

"The new regime which had succeeded his after the coup had become as fragmentary as the old, in the time-honoured way of all revolutions."