Alastair Reynolds

It__ not how far you__e come that matters. It__ where you__e come from.

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.

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__t just gives up, resets itself to zero. Admit it. None of us feel a damn about these people.

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

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

Consider all the inanimate matter in the universe, all the dumb atoms, all the mindless molecules, all the oblivious dust grains and pebbles and rocks and iceballs and worlds and stars, all the unthinking galaxies and superclusters, wheeling through the oblivious time-haunted megaparsecs of the cosmic supervoid. In all that immensity, she had somehow contrived to BE a human being, a microscopically tiny, cosmically insignificant bundle of information-processing systems, wired to a mind more structurally complex than the Milky Way itself, maybe even more complex than the rest of the *whole damned universe*!

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?

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

How did you . . . pass the time?_ Sunday asked. __ou couldn__ just ching out of it, could you?___e had a different form of chinging,_ Eunice said. __n earlier type of virtual-reality technology, much more robust and completely unaffected by time lag. You may have heard of it. We called it __eading_.

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__ 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.

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

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.

You worry that we're becoming monsters. Merlin, we already were monsters. You didn't make us any worse.

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__ 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.

There's such a thing as free will, Tanner. You didn't have to go along with me, unless you want to admit your brain is ruled by your dick. And I didn't get the impression you regretted any of that.

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

Mathematics is a terrible calling. It__ as merciless as gravity. It swallows the soul. There__ a point near a black hole called the last stable orbit. Once you drop below that radius, no force in the universe can stop you falling all the way in. That__ what happened to your mother _ she swam too close to theory, fell below the last stable orbit.