Top 100 Alastair Reynolds Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The stability of the Glitter Band depends on social cohesion, Mister Garlin. We don’t have standing armies, we don’t have a citizen militia. Even the local constabularies constitute a vanishingly small proportion of our population. But this system only functions in the absence of malicious fear-mongering. I have no time for those who disseminate lies and half-truths for their own ends.”

— Alastair Reynolds

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

— Alastair Reynolds

53. “Nightside, cities glistened in chains, and a spray of tinkertoy habitats girdled the planet. Gossamer starbridges reached from the equator towards orbit.”

— Alastair Reynolds

54. “It wasn’t always about bravery or some shining inner goodness. It could just as easily be about the position of your name in the alphabet, the chemistry of your blood, or.”

— Alastair Reynolds

55. “The ship had always been vast and intricate, its topology as unfathomable as the abandoned subway system of a deserted metropolis. It had been a ship haunted by many ghosts, not all of which were necessarily cybernetic or imaginary. Winds had sighed up and down its kilometres of empty corridors. It was infested with rats, stalked by machines and madmen. It had moods and fevers, like an old house.”

— Alastair Reynolds

56. “We should have brought a torch,” he was saying. “We have been to Saturn and back and we didn’t bring a torch.”

— Alastair Reynolds

57. “Could kindness – by only ever taking little steps – twist itself into the worst kind of cruelty?”

— Alastair Reynolds

58. “Truly, it was beautiful to watch. Cruel, too – I admitted that. But what was beauty without a little cruelty at its heart?”

— Alastair Reynolds

59. “All data is stale. The photons reaching your eyes are stale. They tell you that you are looking at something real, but you have no information that the objects before you still exist. They may have vanished into oblivion the instant those photons took wing.”

— Alastair Reynolds

60. “He was a thin, elegant-looking man with precise symmetrical features and the hushed, disapproving manner of a senior librarian.”

— Alastair Reynolds

61. “Behold the wedding gun,’ the Ordinator said, holding the box aloft.”

— Alastair Reynolds

62. “My people are impressing on Tulwar’s people the wisdom of surrender and a rapid shift of allegiance. I’m counting on most them being opportunist thugs who’ll recognize a good thing when it’s offered to them.”

— Alastair Reynolds

63. “That didn’t take long,” Trysil said, clenching a fist so that the muscles popped out along her arm. “You know the captain. When he wants to leave, we leave.”

— Alastair Reynolds

64. “Just because it came from the heart didn’t make it good.”

— Alastair Reynolds

65. “First rule of complex systems,” I said. “You can’t tell friends from enemies.”

— Alastair Reynolds

66. “Then centrifugal gravity took over, and with something close to majesty the skeletal spacecraft descended out of the repair bay as smoothly and elegantly as a falling chandelier.”

— Alastair Reynolds

67. “The first six million years had been all fun and games.”

— Alastair Reynolds

68. “Cowards were exactly the kind of people you wanted around nuclear technology.”

— Alastair Reynolds

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

— Alastair Reynolds

70. “No act of knowledge acquisition is entirely without risk.”

— Alastair Reynolds

71. “Truth is truth, no matter who else believes it.”

— Alastair Reynolds

72. “No,” Father said, wiping a hand across a sweat-glistened brow. “They were using both entrances, and you can bet your sister’s headed for one of them.” Paladin was still sweeping the room, its dome spinning around, lights flashing agitatedly behind the glass. “All right,” I said. “You go back to the cloakroom, where we came in. I’ll go to the south entrance.” “Can I trust you to come back?” Father asked. “Of course.”

— Alastair Reynolds

73. “That,’ Peregrine said, ’is civilisation. Not all who were rewarded deserved to be; not all who should have been were.”

— Alastair Reynolds

74. “Why do today what you can still do in a quarter of a million years?”

— Alastair Reynolds

75. “Elephants have a theory of mind – they can think into the head of another elephant and infer their knowledge of the world, including errors and omissions of knowledge. That puts them above all but a handful of species – a few primates, some very smart birds and cetaceans.”

— Alastair Reynolds

76. “She longed to touch it, to stroke her fingers through that atmosphere, cleaving white billowing clouds and glittering salty seas, until she felt the hard scabbed crust beneath them.”

— Alastair Reynolds

77. “But beyond a certain scale vast was simply vast.”

— Alastair Reynolds

78. “Gravity ruled, and gravity did not take into account circumstances, or the unfairness of things, or listen to eleventh-hour petitions before reluctantly repealing its laws. Gravity crushed, and near the surface of a neutron star gravity crushed absolutely, until diamond flowed like water; until a mountain collapsed into a millionth of its height.”

— Alastair Reynolds

79. “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

80. “Better to live in the ruins of empire, I thought, and stand a hope of being remembered, than to be lost in those golden multitudes.”

— Alastair Reynolds

81. “Some people get it. Most people never will. But that’s art.”

— Alastair Reynolds

82. “To feel oneself so tiny, so fragile, so inherently losable, was at first spiritually crushing. But, by the same token, this realisation was also strangely liberating: if an individual human existence meant so little, if one’s actions were so cosmically irrelevant, then the notion of some absolute moral framework made about as much sense as the universal ether. Measured against the infinite, therefore, people were no more capable of meaningful sin – or meaningful good – than ants, or dust.”

— Alastair Reynolds

83. “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.”

— Alastair Reynolds

84. “Oh, I’m not perfect – not by a long stretch. I just make the rest of you look bad.”

— Alastair Reynolds

85. “I am not cruel,” he said. “Not in the sense you mean. But cruelty is a useful tool if one can only recognise the precise moment when it must be used.”

— Alastair Reynolds

86. “It’s an old pirate tradition. Burial at C.”

— Alastair Reynolds

87. “She hesitated, aware that an ill-judged phrase might anger Triumvir Hegazi; not that she particularly cared. Dared she call it the Melding Plague, now that the Yellowstoners had given it a name? Perhaps that would be unwise.”

— Alastair Reynolds

88. “A fastidious neatness had been at work there, like a poltergeist in reverse.”

— Alastair Reynolds

89. “Believe me, this will help. When everything seems like it couldn’t get any worse, you’ll always be able to tell yourself: I did this one brilliant thing, this one brilliant thing that no one else has ever or will ever do. And that makes me special.”

— Alastair Reynolds

90. “It was created to endure for a specific moment in time. Like a sandcastle, or an ice sculpture. Here, and then gone. In a way, that’s the beauty of it. Who’d marvel at a sandcastle, if sandcastles lasted forever?”

— Alastair Reynolds

91. “All I know is that I think, and therefore I’m exceedingly angry.”

— Alastair Reynolds

92. “I knew that the swallower was just a little knot of matter, squashed so tight that even its own light couldn’t break free of it, and I knew it didn’t have a mind or a will or anything you could think of as an appetite.”

— Alastair Reynolds

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

— Alastair Reynolds

94. “It was not that intelligent life was rare, it seemed, but that intelligent life was very, very prone to becoming extinct. Almost as if something was deliberately wiping it out. The wolves were the missing element in the puzzle, the agency responsible for the extinctions. Implacable, infinitely patient machines, they homed in on the signs of intelligence and enacted a terrible, crushing penalty. Hence, a lonely, silent galaxy, patrolled only by watchful machine sentries.”

— Alastair Reynolds

95. “But it’s the greater fate of the Congregation that concerns me more. Our Occupation, and how it will end. I thought it silly of Rackamore to be troubled by such a distant concern, but I find it much harder to dismiss his fears now. What is the point of any deed, good or otherwise, if this little window of civilisation of ours will soon have its end?”

— Alastair Reynolds

96. “Behold, Mr. Clavain: Chasm City. A place I have to come to know and, while not actually love, perhaps not to detest with quite the same missionary zeal as when I first arrived.”

— Alastair Reynolds

97. “Having created these cognitively enhanced creatures, the safest option at the time appeared to be to launch them into interstellar space.”

— Alastair Reynolds

98. “Another kind of wind, raging out of the Old Sun all the while, but it slips through the hull and the photon sails like they aren’t there at all. Dark-wind, some call it. Or ghost-wind or shadow-wind.”

— Alastair Reynolds

99. “He was like that child who always wants to join in the others’ games, but wants it too badly, so that the other children wonder why they don’t already have friends of their own, and end up even less likely to invite them in.”

— Alastair Reynolds

100. “It is far, far better to close off a possibility, for ever, than to cling to some silly hope.”

— Alastair Reynolds