Alastair Reynolds Quotes

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”.

A city's only ever three hot meals away from anarchy.

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

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?

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.

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

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.