# Quote — Alastair Reynolds, Blue Remembered Earth

> The world had absorbed the dizzying lessons of modern science easily enough, hadn’t it? Reality was a trick of cognition, an illusion woven by the brain. Beneath the apparently solid skin of the world lay a fizzing unreality of quantum mechanics, playing out on a warped and surreal Salvador Dali landscape. Ghost worlds peeled away from the present with every decision. The universe itself would one day simmer down to absolute entropic stasis, the absolute and literal end of time itself. No action, no memory of an action, no trace of a memory, could endure for ever. Every human deed, from the smallest kindness to the grandest artistic achievement, was ultimately pointless.
>
> But it wasn’t as if people went around thinking about that when they had lovers to meet, menus to choose from, birthdays to remember. The humdrum concerns of normal life trumped the miraculous every time.…And the knowledge that humanity was not alone in the universe would be as relevant to most as the knowledge that protons were built of quarks.

- Author: [Alastair Reynolds](https://www.leafyquotes.com/alastair-reynolds.md)
- Book: [Blue Remembered Earth](https://www.leafyquotes.com/alastair-reynolds/blue-remembered-earth.md)
- Page: 282
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alastair_Reynolds#Blue_Remembered_Earth_(2012)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/alastair-reynolds/blue-remembered-earth/the-world-had

## More from this book

> She worked quickly, but not because she considered the commission beneath her. It was simply the way she always approached her art. Preparation, forethought, hours of meditation, then an explosion of swift and decisive action, like the quick and merciful descent of a sword. Execution, in every sense of the word.

p. 272 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/alastair-reynolds/blue-remembered-earth/she-worked-quickly.md)

> “I worry that it’s me they’re really after.”
>
> “You don’t exist. At the risk of wounding your ego, not everyone in the known universe is obsessed with you and your secret history.”

p. 260 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/alastair-reynolds/blue-remembered-earth/i-worry-that.md)

> We have been clever, and on occasion we have been foolish. For smart monkeys, we can, when the mood takes us, be exceedingly stupid. But it was cleverness that brought us to this point, and it is only cleverness that will serve us from now on.
>
> We have no time for anything else.

p. 562 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/alastair-reynolds/blue-remembered-earth/we-have-been.md)