Alastair Reynolds

I’m not on the side of elephants or people, Goma. I’m on the side against stupidity.

“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.”

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

I can’t stop being a rationalist just because it upsets some people.

It was a fault of the human condition—or perhaps a blessing—that there was no situation which did not eventually become the normal state of affairs.

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.

Nature shouldn’t be able to do this, Sunday thought. It shouldn’t be able to produce something that resembled the work of directed intelligence, something artful, when the only factors involved were unthinking physics and obscene, spendthrift quantities of time. Time to lay down the sediments, in deluge after deluge, entire epochs in the impossibly distant past when Mars had been both warm and wet, a world deluded into thinking it had a future. Time for cosmic happenstance to hurl a fist from the sky, punching down through these carefully superimposed layers, drilling through these carefully superimposed layers, drilling the geological chapters like a bullet through a book. And then yesterday more time—countless millions of years—for wind and dust to work their callous handiwork, scouring and abrading, wearing the exposed layers back at subtly different rates depending on hardness and chemistry, util these deliberate-looking right-angled steps and contours began to assume grand and imperial solidity, rising from the depths like the stairways of the gods.

Awe-inspiring, yesterday. Sometimes it was entirely right and proper to be awed. And recognising the physics in these formations, the hand of time and matter and the nuclear forces underpinning all things, did not lessen that feeling. What was she, ultimately, but the end product of physics and matter? And what was her art but the product of physics and matter working on itself?

They had hardly ever spoken of her life before the the day they met in Belém. It was what they had both agreed on, a relationship built on a solid foundation of mutual ignorance.

Crime is an adaptive organism. Squeeze one niche and it moves into another.

I ran an experiment and I got a result. That’s more useful to us than fifty years of theorising.

“Clearly we missed something.”

“You have a fine talent for understatement.”

“Ideology is all there is.”

“Really? I would have thought there were many other human qualities worth considering. Fairness. Generosity. A sense of humour. A willingness to see the best in people, even those we do not automatically agree with.”