Alastair Reynolds

“There’s a catch,” Skellsgard said.

“Another one? But of course there is. You know, I’m thinking I should start a collection.”

As always, it was necessary to strike a balance between a cavalier disregard for the rules and a professional understanding that some rules were more flexible than others.

To feel oneself so tiny, so fragile, so inherently losable, was at first spiritually crushing. But, by the same token, this realisation was also strangely liberating: if an individual human existence meant so little, if one’s actions were so cosmically irrelevant, then the notion of some absolute moral framework made about as much sense as the universal ether. Measured against the infinite, therefore, people were no more capable of meaningful sin—or meaningful good—than ants, or dust.

Worlds barely registered sin. Suns hardly deigned to notice it. On the scale of solar systems and galaxies, it meant nothing at all. It was like some obscure subatomic force that simply petered out on those scales.

Memo to himself: the one way to make people panic was to warn them not to.

Volyova did not like planets at the best of times, and gas giants struck her as an unreasonable affront to human scale and frailty. In that respect, they were almost as bad as stars.

And even if what they showed you is true, that doesn’t begin to make it right. The cause might be just, Felka, but history’s littered with atrocities committed in the name of righteousness.

Clavain saw it all with sudden, heart-stopping clarity: all that mattered was the here and now. All that mattered was survival. Sentience that bowed down and accepted its own extinction—no matter what the long-term arguments, no matter how good the greater cause—was not the kind of sentience he was interested in preserving.

“Is there anyone in Chasm City she hasn’t deceived?”

“Possibly, somewhere, but only as an extreme theoretical possibility.”

Evolution doesn’t greatly care about what happens to creatures once they’ve passed on their genetic heritage.

“Don’t tell me you aren’t the slightest bit curious, Norquinco.”

“I hope you burn in hell, Sky Haussmann.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

The poor didn’t have them and so the rich flaunted them, the larger and more conspicuous the better.

Who was it who said that a wise man speaks when he has something to say, but a fool speaks because he must?