Alastair Reynolds

Enjoy it, kid. Enjoy feeling that you can make a difference.' Floyd flashed him a smile. 'It won't last for ever.

Victory loses its meaning without the memory of what you've vanquished.

Without risk in our lives, we__e scarcely better than machines ourselves.

No act of knowledge acquisition is entirely without risk.

That she had loved Sylveste because he was such a self-important bastard and made something noble of being a self-important bastard, did it with such utter aplomb that it became a kind of virtue, like the wearing of sackcloth

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

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.

But you will come to regret this, Abigail. This won__ be like one of the memories that fritters away into nothing when you come out of that game. This will leave a stain. You__l carry for it for ever, when you could have had a few more years of blissful innocence. Are you sure, now?

Still, it was vision, or at least vision__ idiot cousin.

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.

It is always better to try and fail than not to try.

You're confident he'll have found him, then?""Well, no. I didn't sat that.""If there's one thing I hate," Volyova said, looking coldly at the other Triumvir, "it's mindless optimism.

It's called optimism _ but I__ losing the hang of it fast.

I don't know." That was typical Sajaki; like all the genuinely clever people Sylveste had met he knew better than to feign understanding where none existed.

There was something heartbreakingly beautiful about the lights of distant ships, I thought. It was something that touched both on human achievement and the vastness against which those achievements seemed so frail. It was the same thing whether the lights belonged to a caravel battling the swell on a stormy horizon or a diamond-hulled starship which had just sliced its way through interstellar space.

To see something marvellous with your own eyes - that__ wonderful enough. But when two of you see it, two of you together, holding hands, holding each other close, knowing that you__l both have that memory for the rest of your lives, but that each of you will only ever hold an incomplete half of it, and that it won__ ever really exist as a whole until you__e together, talking or thinking about that moment ... that__ worth more than one plus one. It__ worth four, or eight, or some number so large we can__ even imagine it.