Alastair Reynolds Quotes

“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”

“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”

“I'm not a morning person: I can't function until I've had a coffee - or several.”

“May I share with you my earliest memory of a political row? It was with my mother, about the Queen - classic Freudian stuff, shrinks would say. I was eight, and refusing to watch the Queen's Christmas Day broadcast.”

“The refusal to change by clinging onto superficial material wealth at any cost today, is a certain sentence of death tomorrow for all future priceless life entities we have come to love and know.”

“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?”

“Furious activity is no substitute for analytical thought.”

“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.”

“And what cats have to tellon each return from hellis this: that dying is what the living do, that dying is what the loving do, and that dead dogs are those who do not knowthat dying is what, to live, each has to do.”

“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.”