Top 100 Alastair Reynolds Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It is always better to try and fail than not to try.”

— Alastair Reynolds

2. “Rise to the occasion. Roar like a lion.”

— Alastair Reynolds

3. “I think I’ve reduced the amount of blood in my caffeine system to an acceptable level.”

— Alastair Reynolds

4. “A city’s only ever three hot meals away from anarchy.”

— Alastair Reynolds

5. “It’s the people who don’t worry – those who never have any doubts that what they’re doing is good and right – they’re the ones that cause the problems.”

— Alastair Reynolds

6. “Autocratic governments are masters of self-contradiction. They say one thing, do another.”

— Alastair Reynolds

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

— Alastair Reynolds

8. “She loved sarcasm, especially from engineers.”

— Alastair Reynolds

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

— Alastair Reynolds

10. “Can we drop the ‘artificial intelligence’? It’s a bit like me calling you a meat-based processing system.”

— Alastair Reynolds

11. “It’s an ancient technique known as lying, Khouri.”

— Alastair Reynolds

12. “Birth and death frame a life, give it shape. Without that border it just becomes a kind of sprawling mess, a thing with no edge, no definition, no centre.”

— Alastair Reynolds

13. “But without fallibility there is no art. And without art there is no truth.”

— Alastair Reynolds

14. “As the old saying went, the Manhattan Project wasn’t built in a day. Or was that Rome? Something to do with Earth, anyway.”

— Alastair Reynolds

15. “You worry that we’re becoming monsters. Merlin, we already were monsters. You didn’t make us any worse.”

— Alastair Reynolds

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

— Alastair Reynolds

17. “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.”

— Alastair Reynolds

18. “It looked like a biology lesson for gods, or a snapshot of the kind of pornography which might be enjoyed by sentient planets.”

— Alastair Reynolds

19. “Everything came and went, everything was new and bright with promise once and old and worn out later, and everything left a small, diminishing stain on eternity, a mark that time would eventually erase.”

— Alastair Reynolds

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

— Alastair Reynolds

21. “I was born in a house with a million rooms, built on a small, airless world on the edge of an empire of light and commerce that the adults called the Golden Hour, for a reason I did not yet grasp.”

— Alastair Reynolds

22. “Victory loses its meaning without the memory of what you’ve vanquished.”

— Alastair Reynolds

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

— Alastair Reynolds

24. “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

25. “There was a moment of absolute cosmic cold, as if a billion tiny doors had opened in every cell of his body, letting in the draught of creation.”

— Alastair Reynolds

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

— Alastair Reynolds

27. “I really struggle to pinpoint whether I became a scientist because I like science fiction, or did I gravitate to science fiction because I identified strongly with scientists.”

— Alastair Reynolds

28. “There was no call for that,” Father said. “I’ve never been so – ” “Humiliated?” Adrana finished for him. “You know what the real humiliation is? Being a Ness, that’s what. Grovelling our way up the Mazarile social ladder, trying to pretend we’re something we’re not.”

— Alastair Reynolds

29. “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

30. “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

31. “Volyova did not like planets at the best of times, and gas giants struck her as an unreasonable affront to human scale and frailty. In that respect, they were almost as bad as stars.”

— Alastair Reynolds

32. “I saw immediately what they were: human technology that had become haunted, possessed by quick, gleaming cleverness. I had seen smart machines before then, but nothing with the agility and cunning of true intelligence. I knew instantly that these were a different order of machine. Some alchemy of chaos and complexity had given their minds powers of consciousness and free will.”

— Alastair Reynolds

33. “I am Chiku Akinya. I am the daughter of Sunday Akinya; I am the grand-daughter of Eunice Akinya – Senge Dongma, the lion-faced one, mother of us all...”

— Alastair Reynolds

34. “It was an exceedingly odd thing to see an elephant in a spacesuit.”

— Alastair Reynolds

35. “The two men – Fray and Malkin – were standing near each other. They were not unarmed. They were quite seriously not unarmed. Both men were carrying – or at least aiming – what could only be categorised as small artillery pieces: two bulky gas-powered spinguns, so heavy that they had to be strapped to their bodies via thick leather girdles. Malkin was aiming at the angels, more or less.”

— Alastair Reynolds

36. “The trouble with the dead, Triumvir Ilia Volyova thought, was that they had no real idea when to shut up.”

— Alastair Reynolds

37. “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.”

— Alastair Reynolds

38. “Wind snapped at me, warm and fragrant. The atmosphere was thick with pollen and micro-organisms, goading my body’s ancient defences.”

— Alastair Reynolds

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

— Alastair Reynolds

40. “Even monsters are beautiful.”

— Alastair Reynolds

41. “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

42. “War was about yawning chasms of inactivity, punctuated by brief, screaming interludes of action. And in those brief, screaming interludes, events happened both quickly and with dreamlike slowness, every instant burned into memory.”

— Alastair Reynolds

43. “We have made some collective mistakes as a species, it’s true – invested too much power in things we can’t see, let alone control. But look at the world we have, Chiku. For all its failings, things could be a great deal worse. No one’s died in any wars lately, or been murdered, or left to rot in a prison, or been denied the basic allocation of fresh food and drinking water. No one’s been tortured for their beliefs or made to feel like a pariah because of their sexual preferences.”

— Alastair Reynolds

44. “Everyone has their fulcrum, Chiku. You can bend anyone to any cause with the right timing.”

— Alastair Reynolds

45. “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

46. “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?”

— Alastair Reynolds

47. “Adapt and survive. Make do and mend. These were good mottos for a time traveller.”

— Alastair Reynolds

48. “It’s called optimism – but I’m losing the hang of it fast.”

— Alastair Reynolds

49. “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

50. “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.”

— Alastair Reynolds